. . .
“However,” Eldri says inexorably, “that does not mean we shall allow the wolf to break free of you, or in you, Vaenwode, and raven thus across the world. We are reasonable beings. We do not punish a man more than his life is worth. So we shall pull it out of you.”
He nods to Brygmir, who is setting up a portable smithy and stoking an awful fire.
“Then we shall bind it with unholy chain: with the footfalls of a cat and the arms of a four-armed ape; with the spittle of a bird and the sacredness of death; with the torment of the willing and the bearing witness to the wrongness; and the tape that binds an emu; and the perseverance of hope. And through all these things, and while these things endure, the wolf shall be bound and held to you, Vaenwode, to you and to your family, and you shall keep it close.”
. . .
And through all these things, and while these things endure, the wolf shall be bound and held to you, Vaenwode, to you and to your family, and you shall keep it close.
“You will not touch my family,” blusters Vaenwode.
Brygmir laughs.
Vaenwode looks over at her.
“We will leave, if you like,” she says gaily. “Or you can overpower us, no doubt. Much good that will do your family! Hail Vaenwode, slayer of smiths! Vaenwode, thief and traitor, all-devourer!”
“Well, no,” says Vaenwode. He shifts uncomfortably. “I mean, you can extract the wolf and bind it, sure, but not to my family. Only to me.”
Brygmir meets his eyes. There is a tiny ring of gold around each of her pupils; these swell as she looks at him, and he loses himself in that darkness, it is as if her eyes are the table of the earth and the bowl of the sky, and she is saying something that he does not hear or understand until he shudders a moment later and picks it out of his mind.
She has said: “You have nothing to compel us.”
. . .
“Mercy,” Vaenwode pleads.
He goes down on one knee. He goes down on two. He fights an appalling urge to show them his naked stomach and lowers his head to them instead.
Eldri touches his shoulder.
“Don’t embarrass us,” he says. “It is you or someone else; there can be no mercy.”
In that moment it is complete: Vaenwode’s doom is sealed, it closes about him like a circle. He rises. “Then I will beg no more,” he says, because that can only be the end of it; he is wild with fear but it is no longer a fear that can be struggled with, but only a fear to be accepted and pinned wriggling within his heart.
. . .
The wolf is sprawled there, slick with the ichors of its birth, and Saul looks back from his sugar-space to see that it was after all three puppies and not one; that, or the engoldening, the division, and the extraction have accomplished a surgery that even Aesculapius might have feared to try.
The wolf wriggles. It whines. It looks towards Vaenwode and it licks its lips. It is having trouble moving.
That is when the svart-elves seal it with a horrid chain.
. . .
The chain is soft and silken and it seems like it ought to tear with the littlest pressure but it binds the wolf utterly instead; holds its mouth too tightly to admit a human, svart, or cow; wraps around its limbs: it cannot slip free of it. In the years to come that slender wrap will dig pustulent furrows into the flesh of the growing wolf, it will twist the heart to look at them, but it will also keep the creature hobbled, bind it and its hunger, keep it from gulping down whole villages, cities, countries, or later worlds.
. . .
It is so cruel!
It is so cruel, the chain that binds the wolf!
But it is necessary; or so the svart-elves suppose.
The best, at least, that they can do — the best that they know how to do — and thus, and for that reason, it is done.
Thus to the enemy of Vaenwode; thus to the enemy of the svarts.
And afterwards Vaenwode, who is half-blind from pain and has lost all the hair from his chest, sits with his new wolf. He lets it lick his face, for all the acid of it. He strokes it. He introduces it to his family — to his wife, his daughter, the graves of his parents; to his bed-bound uncle, and to his sons.
. . .
And the wolf is young and oddly docile in those early days of its captivity and Vaenwode imagines for a time that it will serve his family; that it will be loyal to them; that it will be an asset to his line.
This he dreams for the enemy of Vaenwode; this he dreams for the enemy of the svarts:
That perhaps it will be of use to him, if only he keeps it tightly bound.
This he dreams, and this dream endures until the wolf learns the words to ask for freedom.
The look in its eyes when he says he cannot not free it; and more than that, that he will not — it cuts through him. It haunts Vaenwode all his life’s remainder, until the very day he dies.
. . .
And eventually that day comes; it is a day when Vaenwode trusts the wolf too well. He gets too close to the creature that he keeps in chains. He loves it and he belongs to it and so he forgets that it is his enemy; and it bites his arm, snips it off, and swallows it; pins his chest with a delicate foot and whispers to him as blood drops fall from its mouth onto his face:
“Vaenwode, you are made not to keep me but to free me; this is perversion.”
He spits in its face.
“You are my son and my father,” says the wolf. “You are my devourer and you are my food. You will become one with me and later you will free me; I shall ripen my freedom through your children, from that line will my rescuer spring.”
. . .
A concept pushes itself into Vaenwode’s mind. He starts to see something, he starts to think something, it is billowing in his mind like wind-tossed clouds and unfolding itself like a flower. He tries to articulate it but it is as if the mouth of his mind is full of cotton; he cannot find a word for it, a name, he does not even know if he means to argue with or surrender to the wolf.
The distinction becomes inessential.
The wolf lowers its chained mouth, delicately maneuvers it, and bites off Vaenwode’s head. It swallows it; and afterwards, bit by bit, the rest.
. . .
That is how the wolf passes itself down to Jordis Vaenwodesdottir; and through her into the keeping of Nordri Gullwing; and so on down the line and years of family to reach Edmund Gulley, a giant of twentieth-century industry, at the last.
Edmund Gulley will not free the wolf. He cannot free the wolf. But it is almost over.
In the moment the wolf meets young Edmund Gulley, it has an intimation of its savior. It knows its chains will be broken, that it will find its freedom, at the hands of Edmund’s son.
– 8 –
It is seven hundred years earlier, more or less.
Brygmir has returned to the lower world. Eldri wanders the surface and interferes with the world of man. The wolf is not yet Edmund’s, as Edmund is not yet born; the wolf is tangled through, with, and in the hands of Mathys Gullwing, an otherwise undistinguished resident of Canterbury, instead.
The wicked god of space has flown like a wicked word;
Like a wicked knife;
Like, well, a wicked god.
It staggers itself down onto the surface of a world whose people know no hopes, no dreams, no hearts, and no hungers.
It binds them to itself.
It breathes itself in and out through them.
Their warlord’s name is Thon-Gul X; it indwells him.
. . .
He looks up.
Thon-Gul stares through seven hundred years at Earth, and hates.
He can feel the eyes that are staring back.
They will not let him go.
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