Twilight of the Wolves Page 24

  But the transmogrification from human to not, maybe it’s better this way. They leave humanity behind and so they see us as beasts, organic meat to use the way they use the planet, taking and plundering all things. Burning, killing, raping, consuming. If humans are a sickness then these barbarians are a pestilence.

  His hand reaches back and his fingers rub against my knee, stopping me, locking me in the last twenty years.

  I will not live forever, he says in his barking language though his voice is soft. I am already far too old to be living and soon I won’t be. Man never lasts as long as we hope to. Ah, to live forever and escape the cycle of life and Death. Your Deathwalkers will take me and make me ash. I believe I will be the only man honored by both the gods of your land and my own. I’ve lived in your land since before you were born and I have loved it since I first saw it, and even more since I first saw you. I’m sorry if I mistreated you or hurt you. You must understand, to see you then, all those years ago, it was like a rapture. A torrent. A storm, the skies burst open and there you were—radiant and wild—unable to speak with or understand me. In your sleep you growled like an animal. My blood was so hot then and I burned for you every day. Just to be near you was like kissing the suns and holding the moons against my cock, penetrating the skies. I meant to be gentle but the way you looked at me—defiant. Why couldn’t you love me the way I loved and adored you? But, more than that, why couldn’t you just touch me without asking? It was always so difficult with you, even when I knew you cared. I know you do. A part of me believes you only still live to be near me. When I die, you will, too. I know it. You can’t live without me just as I can’t live in a world without you. Did you know there are cultures here that were structured so? When one died, both died. It’s beautiful. So much of your backwards continent is so beautiful it almost makes me weep.

  He exhales loud and turns his face so his living eye watches me, All of this world and all existence beyond it is built around cycles. We revolve around the suns, figure-eighting through space, the moons wander around us, the seasons turn and roll, even the planet spins. History repeats itself over and over, and love always returns to where it began. For me, all of love came clear when I first saw you, fighting against my men, bleeding from the mouth, your eye black and closed, when you spit out that soldier’s finger. Do you remember? I brought you here then. Made you a member of my household. I saved you from the whorehouse. I saved you but your eyes seethed. Dark and desperate and dangerous. You were an inferno. Wild and powerful. But my heart opened upon seeing you and I knew I had to have you. My biggest regret is that you’re barren but maybe it’s for the best. I’ve enough bastards around as is. But my love began with you. That day was the beginning of my heart, the moment I saw you was the first time my heart beat. And now I want you to be here when it beats its last. In my final moments, you will be here. If you go first, I will be there, too. I will come with you, my dear. Aya. My wolfgirl.

  My hands stop and vision is a haze of wolves ripping his head from his neck, the sound of metal and bone crunching between alabaster fangs. The forbidden words. He’s not meant to say my savage name, a secret never to be mentioned before the Invaders. He believes it’s a sign of his devotion to me, to speak to me using my real name, the name given to me as a gift, not forced upon me. He calls me by the name I call myself instead of my slavename. Who told him my name I’ll never know but nor shall I forgive this final humiliation. My teeth grinding to dust to keep from chattering, my whole body tossed to seismic convulsions, I press the knife into my thigh to keep from drinking his blood and eating his heart.

  You tremble, dear. I’m sorry. I just wanted you to know I love you. I always have and I always will, and we will always be together, as we certainly were in our past lives, and will be again in all future lives. Circles never end or begin, they continue on forever.

  There once was a man who was not a man who told me the same thing and another man who became a god who showed me it wasn’t true.

  The jaws of time will take Lord Alexander and all these monsters away and time is a fabric blowing in the wind as the drapes of this room and its curves and bends show me times that were and people I was so many years ago, huddled again after being locked in this room, listening to Polina tell us our history.

  Something to hold onto, even though it wasn’t mine. Even though I wasn’t there. I was never there.

  Children, do you remember the Arcanes? Aye, that’s right. They spoke to the Angels and were almost like gods. They fought the longest, the Arcanes, because they had everything to lose. Many of you have never seen an Arcane or an Angel and maybe never will, if I’m to be honest with all of you, but the Angels would not fight or did not fight or forgot to fight. They’re an unusual species of creature I’m told. Indifferent, like all the old gods. They watch humans and permit humans to exist but they refuse to intercede in any way. They neither protect nor attack humanity. They treat humans dispassionately, like the orphans of a stranger’s land. And maybe we are. Might be we never belonged and so the Angels let this happen and all the gods had let us go after a generation of burning down the planet with war. Some will say we deserved it, to be cast adrift by the gods, but no one deserves this. Slavery. The Arcanes, lovers of the gods, were abandoned by them. That’s what matters. All the gods left us long ago when the humans drove them out and attacked the forest. The world is the forest and the forest is the world. I did not believe it when I was a child in Drache but I believe it now.

  But the Arcanes, an entire legion of them, it was terrifying, calling on the darkness and the light and even Death to attack the Invaders.

  Rapt, all of us focused and listened through the screams through the walls and pretended we didn’t know the damage being done to whoever it was that night.

  The Invaders, Polina said, and their columns of rifles and artillery and their dirigibles and war ships came over the horizon. The great rolling machines that tear across the land, felling trees and villages, carrying soldiers and bringing always Death, or the threat of It. The Goddess followed them and the Crows crowded out the suns.

  This was in Glass, she nodded at the Garasun girls, the last to fall and Arcanes remained a strong presence there till the end, defending even after all else had long lost hope. When the Invaders came into sight, the Arcanes began a dance as if they weaved the very air that made the sky. They reached inside and took hold of their still pumping blood and made many of them their dolls, turning the Invaders against one another, pulling the strings of their veins and arteries as if they were all macabre marionettes, killing their brothers and lovers and fathers and sons. The screaming incantations of Language ripping the white men apart. None of you have heard Language and neither had I till that day. It’s a truly rare sight to see an Arcane fight. Beautiful and dangerous. The ironballs of the Invaders flew but the Arcanes held them in air and made great lumbering metal beasts with the artillery and smashed through the lines, leaving a wake of broken and lifeless bodies. And when the fire rained they took that, too, dolls of flames incinerating the Invaders as an effervescent dragon bleeding across the sky causing the dirigibles to explode. Oh! It was an awesome and beautiful sight, the Deaths of the Invaders, the look on their faces as they retreated only to be murdered by their generals as punishment for cowardice. This was the glory of the Arcanes and all their secret knowledge handed them by the Angels, their lovers. The Glass capital was destroyed that day in fire and smoke and golems and the multitude of ironballs ripping through flesh and crumbling mortar and brick and shattering even the glass back into sand.

  They held them for hours and the boys who were too young to be soldiers took up arms and joined the attack but the Invaders took them all and the Arcanes could not last. Their fatalistic dance as a last chance for our people. For all people. Awesome and godlike as they were that day, they were but men and women and their vitality gave out. Some of them fought themselves to Death, collapsing or turning to dust and ash midsentence, the echoing Language c
aught in their breath, changing the shape of the air around them.

  Polina’s eyes dropped and we hung on her silence, the screams no longer audible, but we all saw what she saw, all those years ago, when this land was ours in more than just words. Tears fell and she wiped them away but said no more.

  Michiko told me once that Polina’s lover died that day in a gust of ash and flame fighting the Invaders.

  The Arcanes are thought to be lost but we know many escaped, hiding, waiting, whispering through the shadows stretching across this invaded land, promising what comes next. Tonight.

  They found me when I emerged as a ruined silhouette falling from the broken comfort of the heart of the world. I left the forest, the world, could no longer bear it or exist within it. I fell, naked and alone, falling apart beneath the fragmented moon.

  They saw me, ran to me, took me in their metal hands and I screamed and raged and clawed at their eyes and throats until they bashed my skull in with their steel fists and all that I saw was the moons being swallowed by jaws of darkness.

  My head hanging, bleeding, carried away, the slavers had me and I didn’t care, had already lost everything.

  I wish I was the moon tonight, bathed in starlight. And I felt the canyons in me reaching almost to the otherside where they would be holes or tunnels through me like the great gash in the moon highlighted by the constant moondust making transient constellations of shimmering dust. I became dust. I am dust yet blowing in the gusts of other lives.

  They locked me with the others and we travelled for delirious deleterious days, shrivelling beneath the suns, dehydrated, broken, empty. So empty that I chewed my fingers until they collared my neck and my hands to keep them apart.

  I could no longer eat but there was no food.

  The others ate rats, insects, spiders. They ate any and everything. Their children dying in their arms, their mothers dying in theirs. Husbands, fathers, lovers, mothers, daughters, all dying away and those who remained were forced to watch the last of their family ripped apart by the other slaves waiting to be consumed.

  I stayed alive against my will. A lean mechanical guard took me and I bled between my legs upon him but he didn’t stop, told me he liked it best like this, made it easier for him, wet and sticky with the smell of life. He was a soldier or a slaver, not that it matters, not that they’re different. They dragged us, the crippled dying mob, across the land, always further and further west.

  Some tried to run but the starved don’t outrun monsters or machines. They were monsters. My only fear for all my past life in the forest was that all I loved would disappear but on that trail of Death and tears I learnt that fear is everywhere that humans breathe. Fear is deep in their heart and the force behind every action. Fear is what makes them human and what controls them. It’s all they are and so it’s all they understand. Because they fear, every action becomes poisoned.

  Disappear, I told myself. This is the last night in my body, I prayed when the soldiers came for me in the night. I didn’t scream, but escaped deeper within myself, clawing for where the wolf once lived, but all I ever saw was you, my Moon, my demon wolf, my blackstar. Your eyes smiling through the sadness of your whole life, taking all of me with you.

  You promised me.

  The Deathwalkers shadowed us and took what was left of the corpses away to the Goddess and we moaned as they drifted to dust to become mud in the rain or dirt on the road.

  They fed us one another and laughed at our concave stomachs and piercing bones wearing away the thin boundary of our skin, coating us more as a mucous than a layer.

  Falling away, deeper and deeper into the nebula of my core where all the galaxies shrunk and compacted and I held onto a stone that smelt of the moon and shined like Twilight where I felt his heartbeat, holding it close, pressing it against the decaying meat of my heart where the only part of me that mattered was ripped asunder.

  Sao, you promised me.

  And through the delirium, the hazed halflife, rose the once-great Luca, the greatest landport of all the world and I prayed and chanted, silently, repetitively, This is the last night in my body. Staring at the fragmented moon fading into the morning, my body fissured and cracked and fell apart the way that moon did thousands and thousands of years ago, changing the shape of the planet and this ecosystem of moons and suns and gods and mortals. And I remembered the day I discovered gods could die and loved ones could lie. I remembered his eyes flashing out of existence and my shadow saving my unwilling and indifferent life with all the love he carried for me. I turned to dust and waited only for that final kiss.

  Willing to be set free. All the love I would never feel again, let go, and see the ocean, the Goddess, my wolves, and you, to be you again. All of you.

  We will always be together, even after this life, my dear. Go ahead, he pushes his finger into my knee, Keep massaging. I want to talk to you like this. It might be the last time we share words. I can feel it, you know. Death. What you savages call Mother. Really, I will never truly understand your people’s obsession with Death and leaving nothing behind, as if your past lives didn’t matter or your future ones didn’t concern you. This very well could be the last day I spend in this body before it’s interred—he laughs, his body quivering and then coughing—I’d like to be buried right here, beneath where we are, with you beside me, he opens his eye and I avoid its gaze and his smile.

  Yes, master.

  I know you’re smarter than you let on and it’s why I still love you and want you by my side. I’m sure you can understand the significance of my love for you, the savage princess who swallowed the heart of the civilised gentleman.

  You see, all of man longs for the understanding and love of another. No, more than long: we need it. For you females it is simply an expectation—a facet of life—because your weakness is what gives you to one another. Weak of mind and body and spirit and so you cling to others, weaving webs of connections, and it is this weakness that’s made man strong. Without your sex’s natural deficiencies, none of this—he lifts a hand and gestures to the room—civilisation, art, none of it would exist. We would be thousands of men dragging a woman and children around with us, beating away others. For men, it is our individuality that marks us. We step away from society so that we may forge it. By standing outside as an observer we can shape its flow and destiny. We create the world but your sex maintains it. Both are important and necessary and our sexes are naturally predisposed for one or the other. This is an axiom and it’s why your savage lands fell as they did. Councils of women! It was almost too absurd to even be real and for many years I didn’t believe. I wish you had been there when my uncle told me of this bestial land full of walking gods and impenetrable woods. Even as a child I knew such a world couldn’t sustain itself. But man, see, though our sex is the stronger and closest to gods, we are those who most need love. We need another. It is a necessity as eating is a necessity. Our lives are spent alone, creating and changing the grand scope of existence, but it isn’t until we find the other, the one who belongs to us, wholly, that we take on meaning and all our accumulated signs move from symbols to metaphors. Where lust becomes desire and love.

  You see, my dear, women are not fit to govern anything beyond a household. Too emotional and hysterical. But I’ve lost myself in the explanation.

  The point is this: To choose you is to elevate you. The world is full of signs and ciphers. My skin is a sign of my heredity and my natural standing in the hierarchy of man, while yours is another. Not quite a Garasun who are not quite Dragonlords who will never be us. We are touched by the light of distant stars, not these coarse blues and reds that color the people of this land. Our light travels farthest to reach us and make us and so it is only natural that it’s stronger. Our god does not slumber and watch us die. He is all of us and we are all him and his infinite sphere. You people obsess over shadow and light and Death and life, but we insist on living, and so we create ourselves as simply as we created our god. All is within man’s h
ands, within his right! We have built a better world and will build one for you too. It saddens me that I will never see it and that you won’t share it with me, but we will reap its benefits when we are born again. These are the signs of true power. Gold and steel and the hands. Man’s hands can do anything, from creation to destruction.

  The metal you see embedded in my body is a sign of my immortality and the highest reaches of man. The gold veined through it is a sign of the way I, personally, have stepped higher than most. The wrinkles and ruin of my skin are signs of man’s limitations and the life I have created and the way the world has tried to fight against me. I have weathered every storm spacetime offers and yet I stand, unbent.

  He rubs my knee as if comforting me, It will not last. Even signs fade and change and wash away. All of this power and prowess will disappear into the ether. And I choose to spend eternity with you. All future lives as we have spent this one, as we have spent the previous ones, with you by my side.

  Do you know, when I first saw Luca, I knew it would be my legacy. I would make this city with my hands and mind into something that could never and will never exist again. The dances, the songs, the markets, even the temples, the eclectic nature of this place opened up the world to a far grander reality than one I had ever imagined. But I knew it would soon fall and it would be my responsibility to give it back to the world. And so I have. With every breath for the last twenty years, I have taken the best of the old Luca and the best of me and made the greatest city this continent has ever seen.

  It’s for you, my dear. My wolf. My heart. All that I do is for you. To make you mine.

  The wolfgirl stayed awake at night listening to her blackstar shine like the fragmented moon above. A smile leapt across her lips and she held on tight to the stone full of ephemeral glowing clouds of light.

  We’ll be there soon, she said to the darkness, to her shadow, We’ll be there and we’ll make this all whole. You’re afraid, I know, but don’t be. No harm will come to us with Sao here. Nothing can stop him and he will do anything to protect me. To protect me is to protect you. He may not like you but it’s only because of what you once were just as he hates himself for what he has become. Don’t take it to heart. Do you have a heart? He means you no harm. Can you hear it? His heart beating. It’s connected to the rivers and the pulse of the forest, the heartbeat of the world. I have a feeling that the Yi live at the center of the world where they cry out loud for the wolves, for the gods. No, not like that. Not a center inside the planet but a center where all life began. Where the Lunar Sea once was, where the lunar flowers still are. What I understand about spacetime is that we perceive it confused. One moment follows the other. That’s how we experience it but I don’t think that’s how it is. When you live with a wolf or even only see one I think it becomes obvious that it’s not like that. Today will be followed by last year and then six months from now. If time is a wheel that rolls onward then something about it becoming tangible bends and distorts it. My memories of the past happen even now, this moment, alongside my voice. I see the reds of the falling leaves and feel the summer sun on my back even as I hear your stillness. You know, it’s the most noticeable thing about you. That silence. The complete and utter lack of noise. When I talk to you I feel less alone but I also sometimes wonder if you’re even here. But I feel you, your heart like a piece of string clinging to the thick wires of the forest, of life. You’re a shadow but one that’s barely there.