The Wolf-Man's Trail
He joined the shepherds to avoid the law, but still darker things waited in the mountains.
He knew there were wolves in the Nierpin Mountains. The broad peaks rose before him dark and stony and wet with frigid spring rains that gathered between the spurs and surged down into the valleys. For all of Langei’s life they had existed on the horizon. Now he found himself at their feet. He knew there were wolves, but at the time other things frightened him more.
And if asked, he would have said there was no such thing as a Vilkolak.
“I must be away urgently, you understand?” Langei said. His wide-brimmed hat shielded his blue eyes from the spitting rain, but his thick beard was fast becoming a sponge. “I’ll ask you not to inquire into my business. It’s my own and no one else’s. You’ll be compensated for your discretion, see? I can pay you!”
His audience, a quartet of Barric shepherds, leaned on their staves and regarded him with something between suspicion and indifference. Even in the rain they smelled exactly like their sheep. Filthy, wet, dressed in layers of undyed wool clothing, thick hats, and leather boots stitched and restitched into only approximations of footwear. Three generations – one old and whitened, two of middle age like Langei, and one youth still unvisited by adolescence – and all four sucking on wooden pipes and squinting at this newcomer through the rain. Behind them, their sheep moved about the sloped pasture like giant, wet cotton bolls. Each bore a strip of ochre dye upon their shoulders the exact tone of dried blood. A half-dozen dun-coated dogs lay about the perimeter containing their flock.
“I probably look a fop. This doublet is better cut for a festival, but it was the warmest thing I had. It’s a fine piece, though… mayhap if we encounter some lasses up in the Kulhot Highlands I could woo them in it!”
He laughed. They did not.
“I may be past my youth, but for fifteen years I served as a sailor aboard one of the Presbyter’s own barques! You two are brothers, aye? You look alike. I served with my brother, so I know those bonds. I won’t be a burden! Look, see this scar? An Accuroic pirate made that groove. Well, he’s dead and I’m alive. And should we encounter beasts, I’ve brought my sword here. Why, I can…”
He stopped to wipe the rain from his eyes. The child shepherd removed his pipe for a moment to blow a geyser of smoke.
“Listen, fellows… the bailiff is after me. The charges are untenable, but it’s dire! I… I need to go someplace I can’t be found… I can’t be found. Look, I’ll pay you! I’ll pay you! This should be ample!”
He needn’t have bothered. None of them spoke his native Ganthic. But they spoke coin, so it was agreed. Barrians belonged to their own people, after all, beholding to their own laws and customs. He could be safe in their company.
They left that very day, mere weeks before he would hear his first wolf howl.
***
Day by day the pilgrimage progressed. The Nierpins enfolded them on all sides and the few trees thinned and vanished until the whole world was only mountains. Nearly every day was overcast. The peaks around them scraped against the gray curtain, but the horizon glowed a stony, oceanic blue as if the sky were a squalling sea and they were suspended upside-down above it. Among the black crags grew virid mosses and shrubs like cracks in a malformed citadel. Boulders of packed snow speckled with mud from rain stood melting everywhere in smooth and alien shapes that crushed unevenly underfoot.
Against Langei’s labored breathing, the only sounds in the world were the patter of rain, the rush of rivers new and old, and the click and rasp of hooves on stone accompanied by occasional bleats. The shepherds whistled to their dogs, but spoke little. Langei did occasion to see their demeanor brighten as they pushed further into the wilderness. They smiled more, and seemed to spritely caper over the jagged boulders and snowfields like children. They rarely stopped during the day, and would eat meals on foot of hard cheese and even harder bread, but at every opportunity would sip from the large wineskins at their hips. They slept on their coats beneath the blackened sky.
Kept awake by the cold, Langei would lie on those mountainsides thinking of his warm home far to the south where the summer was surely unpacking its balmy comforts. Having nobody to speak to, he would find a shrub stick and write notes in the dirt that only he and God would read and nature would soon erase. My name is Langei Pedileph, he wrote as if clinging to a thing that had already lost any meaning. I find myself high in the Nierpins. We are bound for the Kulhot Highlands whereof to summer with the flock. What have I done? What have I done?
The dogs lying nearby picked up their heads and looked out into the dark. They remained that way for minutes, all in the same direction, then settled.
***
The droving roads took them higher, and where it narrowed their procession would elongate to a quarter mile or more. They passed over flumes and beneath renegade waterfalls that shunted icicles down from the peaks. Fogs would wander in like creatures of their own purpose and agency, erasing the world around them then returning it as it was. They crossed and recrossed rivers that appeared dianite blue at distance but perfectly limpid up close, and always suffocatingly cold.
Langie was among the flock crossing one such river with the water swirling just below his knees when the current stole his footing and he grabbed two sheep by each their wooly rump to stop from being swept away. The sheep thrashed and bleated and ran upstream making no progress and he held tight behind them like a sorry charioteer. “Help! Help me!”
The shepherds only stood watching as he dangled there and the water crested up into his face.
“Dhimme!” he found the word in their Barric language. “Dhimme, you stupid bastards!”
They pulled him from the water, sat him on the stony bank, and offered him a skin to drink from. He accepted it without thinking. As the snout passed beneath his nose the aroma of reasty grape pomace enveloped his sinuses and his eyes ran with tears. He hadn’t even drunk any and he was on his side coughing and retching.
They laughed. He did not.
My name is Langei Pedileph, he wrote that night. I find myself high in the Nierpins. I am surrounded by idiots. It seems my guides cannot perceive or aid a drowning man unless he screams ‘help’ in their native–
His stick stopped as the tip reached a large blemish in the mud.
A lupine imprint.
He bent over to inspect, compared it to his own fist, stretched his fingers out to try to match the size.
No, it couldn’t be a real wolf footprint. It was far too big.
***
A few hours later he was awakened by screaming.
The dogs bayed, barely containing the shrieking sheep. The shepherds ran in all directions and shouted into the void. The moon was a vague glowing impression behind the clouds, a light that gave no light.
Langei was on his feet with sword drawn and eyes wide for danger. “Kushet?” he cried in Barric, asking where it was though he knew not what.
The eldest Barric suddenly made a sharp whistle that brought man and dog alike to silence. In the darkness Langei could see them gathering in a circle. He went and stood next to them.
All was silent save for the sheep and the wind. The dogs lay prone and panting.
Then Langei understood, for there in the circle was the elder, the youth, and one of the middle-aged ones.
Where was the fourth?
The elder’s hands rose to his mouth. “Alloooo!” he cried out like a pilot lost in the fog.
No answer. The wind passed through the silence.
“Alloooo!”
Then came the answer. Perhaps a half-mile away. It was a howl. A solitary howl, filled with an appetite and malice beyond the capacity of mere animal, as if the nightmares of the sheep had taken on the matter of a beast. As if the darkness itself had birthed its own foul offspring freshly free of its sac and making its first terrible vocalization.
The howl finished, and when the peaks were done reverberating with it every dog whined like a welp and every sheep bleated and cowered together.
***
They sat in that circle all night, and at the first suspicion of light they searched for traces. It didn’t take long to find that purple ribbon of blood leading up the hillside.
They found where he’d been devoured some half-mile away. The ground was covered in blood as though buckets of it had been brought and dumped there in sacrifice. A few remnants of clothes lay squashed into the mud. More time passed before they found the rest of the body in the near dark some distance away. It likely would have taken several more hours to find if not for the dogs’ noses.
The dead man had only made one scream because his throat was torn out, white tendons standing beneath, bridges for the gathering flies. His clothes from his sternum to his knees were shredded, and all the flesh beneath had been devoured. His organs were gone all the way up into his chest as if he’d never been a man but only a puppet. Blood speckled his face. His vitreous eyes were wide and fixed on some terrific object in the clouds above. A fly landed on his eyeball, then left.
Langei kept looking at the body, then back where they’d found the innards. There was no bloodtrail between that site and this one. These leftovers hadn’t been dragged. They’d been thrown. “Not merely a wolf…”
A dog whimpered and nosed the dead man. The other middle-aged shepherd fell to his knees. His hands closed into fists before him, pressed against his sockets, then beat against his forehead until a wail escaped. “Bellei!” he cried. “Bellei! Bellei! Psa, o’bellei?”
That is how Langei learned the Barric word for brother.
***
They made a pyre and sang Credic hymns in broken Ailinic. The brother trembled all the while, but when he set the small flame to the tallow his hands were steady. God’s grace pushed the clouds aside and the Nierpins showed their rugged glory as the black smoke ascended and the wet fuel popped.
The sheep bleated all about them. The wind moved the shrubs and the pyre heeled and guttered and righted. But the shepherds and their dogs stood as statues on the promontory, tears running from stone.
Finally the old one spoke. “Sovr i’krejet, kemshir mektert o’prene.”
Langei recognized the prayer, and echoed it in his native tongue. “Sovereign of creation, have mercy on us, these sinners.”
***
The old man threw the staff at Langei’s sleeping form, hitting him in the shoulder and face. Langei was on his feet in an instant with his sword half-drawn.
“Vetate,” the old shepherd motioned at the staff then walked away.
Langei had thought the road difficult before. He knew nothing until he picked up the staff.
For two days he labored, swinging his staff at the sheep, running aside to head off stragglers, and suffering the jeers of the shepherds. Lacking their taciturn, he railed and cursed at the dogs, the shepherds, the stones, the rain, the clouds, and the mountains.
And the sheep. Especially the sheep.
“You hopeless imbecile!” he harangued a ewe stranded atop a small boulder. “You came up that way, go down the same route! By the chorus of Halloweds, if God had not given you nostrils you might have suffocated the first time you shut your mouth!”
He clambered up, wrapped his arms around her trunk, and carried her down.
As though to mock his fury, the weather worsened. For two days their path ascended and on the third they were visited by a blizzard from nowhere. Skirting one of the spurs, they came to a place where a rockslide covered the road, leaving only a small, exposed path at the edge. The rest of creation was cloaked by mad swirls, although through the mists at the bottom Langei vaguely descried a ribbony waterway cutting through the rocks. “We cannot–” he began, but even as he did the middle-aged shepherd pushed past the flock and went first. He disappeared into the blizzard, then from beyond their vision called to the sheep. They followed readily, taking the path two-by-two as if the imminent danger were not there.
Langei found himself creeping along the inside, hugging the cliff wall and clawing at the loose, wet gravel with his fingers. He could sense the others passing undisturbed behind him but knew if he turned around he would freeze in fear. Crabwise he moved along the face, breathing hard and cursing aloud.
He reached the exposed edge when suddenly a malign wind rose up and the snow flurries rushed passed and stole his breath. The sheep behind him pressed against his legs and he nearly faltered as the mountain’s icy breath filled his ears and bit his nose. He put his chest against the loose stones and gasped but the fury would not relent. Now rubble cascaded down and a few bits struck him and the sheep huddled closer and he had no air at all.
The shepherd’s whistle. The caravan of sheep moved again. They passed behind him, on and on through the storm. Their numbers thinned, then a final straggler brushed by, and suddenly they were all gone and it was just Langei and the exposed face. He called out to them. He crept further along the path, but the sound of the whistle and the bleating faded into empty wind.
He was alone.
Snowflakes yawed along the rock as though he and the face he clung to were pitched sideways and falling. His limbs shook like brambles in a storm.
Finally he turned his head and looked in the direction the sheep had gone.
Naught but whiteness. A world erased.
He looked in the direction they’d come.
There it was. The Vilkolak. The wolf-man.
It stood on hind legs. Once and a half taller than a man. Thick hair black as tar. White fangs caged within a long snout. Breath pluming out into the wind like a fumarole.
It stood thirty feet behind him on the trail. Its yellow eyes trained upon him.
Langei lost his manhood. He wailed like a soul bound for Hel: “This… this is it! It is the Fiend! God preserve me, the Fiend has sent a Vilkolak for me!”
The beast did not move. It only watched him, this little lamb left behind in the storm.
“I confess, I confess! ‘Tis I! I am the murderer! I am the fratricide! My brother is dead and I have killed him, and the blood shall never be laved from my soul!”
He turned away from the monster and cried:
“God! My God, come find me!”
Ahead of him on the trail a figure began to materialize out of the storm. It wasn’t God. It was the youngest shepherd.
“No! Approach not! It’s not safe!”
Langie looked back behind, but the monster was gone.
Now he was gibbering and half-crazed, but the youth grabbed him roughly by the scalp and dragged him down to his level. Perceiving the Ganthian was freezing, the young shepherd unstopped his wineskin, stuck it in Langei’s mouth, and tipped.
Reasty grape pomace, pulp and all, filled Langei’s mouth and enveloped his sinuses. He retched, but the boy grasped the adult’s jaw and blew into his nose, forcing him to swallow. Down Langei’s throat and into his gut the pomace slid. Like molten fire. Like acid milk from a she-wolf’s teat.
***
Now he was one of them.
He understood now how they frolicked so across the mountain, for he felt the same. The pomace burned in his limbs and put a spring in his step even as it left him soused. He was given his own wineskin, and though the shepherds still laughed to see his expression whenever he sipped it, he soon began to laugh along. “Tikrugr!” he would shout in their tongue as a toast, and they would echo the cheer.
He still cursed at the sheep, but his curses began to be laced with an affection he could not articulate. He berated the sheep for their girth as he carried them from their lost perches and back to the flock. They learned the sound of his voice, especially as he learned more Barric words.
The pilgrims climbed higher still and occasionally their path transgressed the overcast and reached promontories above the lower-flying mists, that wondrous plane where the other peaks reared higher than the curtain like a rugged archipelago above a white sea, God’s vaults of unfashioned beauty hidden above the known world. They camped upon the peak one evening, and as a dog settled in beside him he wrote: My name is Langei Pedileph. I find myself high in the Nierpins. My God, how the stars up here do burn!
***
They were mere miles from the Kulhot Highlands when it attacked again.
Crossing a mountain saddle, sunlight stark and blinding on the blue glacier beneath them. The youth was at the front and Langei at the midpoint. He was humming a tune to himself when a headwind arose.
The dogs caught the scent. Like a curse of panic laid upon them they flew into a fury.
It stepped out from behind a boulder near the van. Its head flew back and chest rose in a terrible howl that froze the procession.
The flock scattered in all directions, some fleeing ahead, some behind, and still others breaking down the glacier until they lost their step and slid toward their deaths. The older shepherd raised his staff but amid the rush of sheep was knocked down. The dogs ran about desultorily and kept looking from the flock to the shepherds to the monster before them.
The beast swung its head toward the youngest shepherd a hundred feet off. It lowered itself onto clawed hands and launched off the glassy surface toward him.
“Wait!” commanded a voice.
The beast skidded to a stop and turned toward Langei.
“‘Leave these good men alone! Your quarry shall be with me!”
The beast heaved with anticipation. Its head shot back and forth between the lad and the Ganthian some three-hundred feet away with his sword drawn valiantly. Hoops of spittle swung from its mandibles. Its black and sheenless hide stood against the gleaming landscape like a hole in a painting.
“Come, fell creature!” Langei marched forward, the icy slope between them now clearing of sheep. His blade caught the light as he brought it to his face in a salute. “Come and grant me satisfaction!”
The beast lowered itself again, and sprang toward Langei, bounding ten feet at a leap, claws grasping the glacier and throwing bits of snow behind.
“Yes, here we are! Come!” Langei’s wits demanded flight, but a deeper fire bade him remain. “Come and meet me! This shall be my sticking place!”
The beast was within two bounds of him. Langei was ready to die.
Then the monster’s eyes twitched to the side, where the middle-aged shepherd was charging in, swinging his staff around his head while a shrill whistle sang from his lips.
The dogs leaped forward from all sides, sinking their teeth into the beast’s limbs. The monster’s next leap was interrupted, and it crashed down on its shoulder, crushing one of the dogs and sliding partway down the glacier toward a nearby boulder field.
Langei rushed upon it, but now the elder and the youth both joined him as they descended on the frenzied black mass whose jaws snapped and claws flew and who roared like nothing they’d ever heard. The beast’s arm swung and a dog was whipped spinning into the air like a doll with a long strip of black flesh still in its mouth. The middle-ager cracked his staff down on the creature’s crown and ruptured its eye like a grape but was repelled on the next blow and bounced off hard stone. The creature swung next toward the elder but a dog made a terrific leap onto its back and bit its nape and the beast’s guard opened.
Langei saw his opportunity, ran in beneath it, and thrust.
The bladepoint struck a rib but glanced off and continued its course unto the hilt. A slight puff escaped the beast’s chest like the burst of a bellow and it faltered.
Langei thought he’d won.
The beast’s claw caught him in the head.
White sparks erupted in his vision and his limbs contorted as he flew then tumbled to a stop. His wits summoned him instantly to his feet but the horizon tottered and a rope of pain ran up and down his scalp as he looked.
Two dogs lay dead. One with a broken spine whimpered and spun in a wide circle across the stones. The other three stood snarling. The middle-aged shepherd held a rock the size of a large fieldstone while the other two brandished their staves. In their midst staggered the beast, snarling and snapping its jaws. Its saliva ran pink and frothy from its black lips and only half its chest moved as it heaved, for in the other half protruded the hilt of Langei’s sword where blood ran steadily out like a broached barrel. The beast made a barking noise that was in fact a cough and sank slowly toward the puddle beneath. As soon as it reached all fours the middle-ager screamed and charged in with the rock raised above his head.
Down came the stone on the beast’s crown. The crack echoed across the spur. The beast fell like a table with the legs collapsed and ceased moving but the middle-ager was not finished. He picked up the rock again. Langei watched him raise it high and throw it down. He picked it up again raised and threw it down. And again. And again.
The blows reported like gunshots. Crunch turned to squash. The stone splintered and slickened. The creature’s skull was cratered into a wet, black carpet that swam with bone and teeth. Pink tissue spattered the ground around.
Finally the shepherd dropped the rock. His breath was ragged and his eyes wandered across the blue vault above, vengeance delivered but justice deprived. He looked at the stone, then at his stained hands, then at his kinsmen.
Langei watched it all, and all he could think of was a brother now slain.
***
He summered with them and their flock in the verdant Kulhots, and when autumn approached they journeyed down again.
When he first confessed to the Ganthian authorities, they wouldn’t arrest him. They couldn’t believe this sunburned, weathered shepherd could be Langei Pedileph, the man accused of murdering his brother earlier in the year. One of them said he was clearly Barric, and told him to go back to his people. Langei laughed at this till he couldn’t breathe.
Court was held the following month in the nearby city. The grand hall was packed. “Next item!” barked the judge.
Langei stepped forward.
“Fratricide. The punishment is hanging.” The judge touched his pelt coat and leaned back in his chair. “Are there any witnesses present who might object?”
“Yes, Your Honor!” shouted someone in the commons.
Langei turned in surprise as four men stepped out of the crowd. The first, a hieratically robed man with a long beard, black scapular, and skullcap — the attire of a Barric priest. The other three were familiar, filthy shepherds.
“Mimeqti!” Langei exclaimed. My friends!
“Your Honor,” said the priest in a heavy accent, “we hear this man is accused of murder, but these three claim him as our own, and thereby we must judge him by the laws of our own people.”
A murmur passed through the crowd. The judge’s eyebrow rose. “You are all Barric. This man is Ganthian; he is not yours.”
“These gentlemen, Your Honor, claim otherwise. This man called Langei summered with them in the Nierpins, and there assisted in the slaying of a Vilkolak.”
Now the assembly dissolved into shock and chatter. The judge rapped his cane loudly against the floor. Order returned. “Is this true, Sir Pedileph?”
“It is true, Your Honor.”
“Your Honor, if I may…” the priest shuffled closer to Langei and addressed him in Barric: “You understand me.”
“Aye, I do.”
“Prove it to me. Tell me your account in this tongue.”
He began to, and got as far as the first night with the Vilkolak when the priest stopped him.
“That’s enough. Now listen: these men vouch for you. They tell me they would have you in their company. You would be as one of them, forsaking your Ganthian people and living as a Barric henceforward. Now I shall ask you – and be not glib in your response – will you have them?”
Langei felt a burning in his eyes. “I will.”
“Then,” said the priest returning to Ganthic, “we would claim him as our own, Your Honor. Ganth has always honored our people’s laws, and we would have the court entreat us so today.”
“Barric or no, the Presbyter cannot allow a murder to go without redress. Some sentence is in order. Still, he has no other kin, I see no weeping nieces or nephews demanding justice…” The judge touched his chin pensively, then flicked his fingers out. “Banishment, then. Take your man, priest. If he’s ever found in the Presbyter’s realm again, he shall be hanged.” His cane rapped against the floor. “Dismissed! Next item!”
Langei remembered little after that, except that he had struggled to remain standing, but was supported out of the building by three pairs of hands.
***
The summer sun shined down on the verdant highland leas of Kulhot. The wind passed lightly over the grasses and vibrant meadow flowers. Clouds rolled gently overhead. The Barric shepherds drove their sheep here in their thousands on their annual journey through the Nierpins. They drank and laughed and told stories and sang songs.
On this summer, and for many summers thereafter, one might find on any bare patch of ground the following Ganthic words drawn in the dirt with a twig or stick:
My name is Langei Pedileph. I find myself high in the Nierpins.
I am at peace.
Thanks for reading! This one was a ton of fun to write, so I hope you enjoyed it. If enjoyed this story, you might like this one of mine:
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What a wonderful, rich tale!
Well done. Nice use of shifting narrative distance. Intriguing