Star Wolf!

by Ted White

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Makstarn was ugly, an outcast in the midst of the beautiful people of his tribe. Where they were tall and slender, he was short and squat. Where they were golden, touched with the beauty of the dawn, he was black and hairy . . . and hated by those of his own generation. It little mattered that the Elders respected him for what he was . . . and for what his father, Max Quest, had been; the young were all that mattered. And their hatred drove him at last from the tribe, and on an impossible journey in search of the memory of his father . . . and in search of his own manhood.

Release date: May 31, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 147

Sample

Makstarn had been conscious of his difference for as long as he could remember. He had been conscious of it because it had been drummed into him, repeatedly, by his mother, by those children who were his peers, and by the Elders. Each, of course, took a somewhat different tack.

“You, my son, are descended of the mightiest man who ever walked this land,” Bajra had told him, when he had asked why he, alone of all the children, had no father. “Your father was a man greater than men. He came from nowhere, and he returned there once again. He came to father you and to rescue your people from bondage. He was a great man, and let no one speak against him.”

Old Hekmight told a somewhat different story.

A wanderer he was, and a savage man. He knew nothing of weapons, and we had to teach him to handle the crossbow. But a fighter, now—that he was!” A fire would kindle in the old man’s eyes as he slipped into his memories. “A savage fighter! A great, hulking dark man, shorter than most, and broader. Not, perhaps, a man to sup with often, but one to stand with in a battle! A strange one, he… And he sired you so that we might have in you some of his own fiery spirit. You must grow tall, lad, and you must walk tall…”

“Toad!” Jetarn screamed at him. “Squat, ugly toad!” It did not pay to be too swift at the running games. It was not wise to show one’s superiority over the other children. They had their ways of getting even.

“Toad! Toad! Toad! Black, ugly toad!” Jetarn yelled.

It was all he could do to keep from smashing his fist into that toothy, gaping mouth. He turned his back and walked away. Tears slid silently down his dusty cheeks.

He was then seven years old.

The tribe had moved across the river soon after recapturing its straggling flocks and gathering up what possessions remained at the old camp site unbroken and unstolen. The memory of Rassanala’s raiders was too fresh, and it blunted their age-old fear of the ruins of Shanathor, the ancient city, across the river.

Before Makstarn had grown to a swelling in his young mother’s belly, other nomads, drifting remnants of tribes caught by Rassanala’s growing maw, also made their way across the river to the place not far from the ages-old ruins. By the time he was born, the tribe numbered thirty-seven.

It was a time of many new babies. Few of the women had been able to avoid the attentions of their captors, and even those who had, had found themselves moved by that primal force of nature which seemed always to work in times of disaster and war: the urge to mate, to couple, to conceive new survivors.

When Makstarn was three, the tribe had swelled in number to fifty-six.

When he was five, disease caught many of the older men, and some of the new babies, and when the tribe moved on to a new camping spot further down river, and to the south of ruined Shanathor, its number was forty.

When he was seven, he was one of nine boys and six girls of roughly his own age. And he was alone, among them.

His mother was tall and slender, like all the nomads. Her hair was a rich and sun-burnished gold. She brushed it often and wore it in waist-length braids.

The older men—there were no young men—wore beards that varied from the brass of ripe grain to the white of advanced age, and rarely let their hair fall below their shoulders. They all stood proud and tall.

The other children, few older than he, were slender, willowy, supple like young reeds, their flaxen hair bright in the sunlight. Their legs were long, their hips narrow.

Makstarn could only glower at them enviously from under his dark brows. Already he stood a head shorter than his age-mates, his legs thick and stubby, his waist and hips the base of a barrel-thick chest. His hair—and it seemed to cover his body with a fur-like down—was jet-black.

It hardly mattered that he was stronger, more agile, quicker of reflex, and the fastest runner among them. He was different.

Difference is no indicator of value. Makstarn knew full well that his mother considered him to be different, and that in her eyes he was the better for it. And Hekmight and the other Elders, much as they might deplore his father’s savage ways and try to make him into one of their own land, they acknowledged that his difference was good, not bad.

But Makstarn could not live among the Elders, and his mother, he could easily sense, was prejudiced. For better or for worse, he relied upon the judgment of his peers.

He was a toad. He was dark and squat and ugly.

It was quite as simple as that.

And this is why, when he was seventeen, Makstarn needed only the flimsiest of excuses to run away.

The wolf came into the camp quite suddenly and unexpectedly. The watchdogs had made no protest, but they could hardly have been expected to, since both were sleeping downwind of the camp, near the flock.

Makstarn was sitting on a stone, staring silently into the fire, trying to forget what he had seen not an hour earlier. Across the fire from him, he knew, Rifka still sat close by Jetarn, their manner innocent, their gaze upon him challenging and impudent.

He did not look up until, a flicker of movement in the firelight alerting him, he stared, startled, into the red-glowing eyes of the wolf.

It sat on its haunches at the very edge of the circle of firelight, and looked at him. Its mouth dropped open, and a long red tongue hung out. The animal yawned, its fangs sharp and white, then licked its chops and closed its mouth again.

Around its neck, Makstarn saw a narrow band.

He felt a strange pumping of blood within him, and time seemed seized and still. No one else had yet seen the beast. It was as though this creature had stepped across time and space to confront him alone.

He knew the legends of the wolf that had accompanied his father out of the desert. The wolf had fought at his father’s side against the raiders, and had been slain. His carcass had still been at the campsite when the rescued nomads returned, and his mother had shown him one of its great fangs, which she had kept as a talisman. They had buried it among their own dead, she had told him.

This wolf: was he the ghost of his father’s companion, an apparition come to haunt him in the night? He knew of the walking spirits who hunted peace on the land before departing for their rebirth in other places, but he had never seen one, and had never expected to.

The wolf moved slowly, but without fear, into the light. It was heading directly for him.

Rifka screamed.

Makstarn laughed, a short bark that might almost have come from the wolf, which pricked up its ears and looked back and forth across the fire.

“A wild beast!” Jetarn shouted, leaping to his feet. “I’ll kill it!”

“You won’t!” Makstarn said. “He’s hungry. We’ll feed him.” He tossed a stew bone at the wolf’s feet. The wolf bent to sniff at it.

His mother jerked awake to look back and forth at each of them, her eyes blinking away sleep. “Makstarn, my son—what is this animal? Where did it come from?”

“A wolf, Mother,” Makstarn said. “Did you not recognize it? You’ve described it to me a thousand—”

“It came straight from slaughtering our flock,” Jetarn declared. He waved his empty hands bravely, but ventured no closer.

The wolf set to crunching the brittle bone between its teeth.

The scream and the shouts had attracted attention at the other fires. Several older men came into the circle of light.

“A wolf!” one cried.

“What has brought it here?” asked another.

The third pointed sternly at Makstarn. “Is this your doing, boy?”

Makstarn tossed a piece of stewed meat to the animal. “I never saw it before in my life.”

“It knows him!” Rifka said, her voice thin and high-pitched. “It came straight to him!”

“A wolf,” Bajra mused. “It is a wolf, but not the one that your father had…”

“Like his father…” The phrase passed from mouth to mouth.

Makstarn held out his hand. Cautiously, the wolf sniffed at his fingers. Then, suddenly, his red tongue whipped out and curled over Makstarn’s knuckles.

The others gasped, but Makstarn did not flinch. “He is like a dog,” he said. “He wants to know me.”

“Why you?” Jetarn asked.

“Perhaps because I am the only one among you who does not fear or hate him,” Makstarn answered softly.

“Because he’s different,” Rifka hissed.

“I heard that!” Bajra said. “It’s true, my son is different. This is the sign, the omen. My son—”

“Mother. Stop.”

The woman’s face seemed to close in within itself. She lapsed into a silence that no one broke.

The wolf pushed closer to Makstarn, and looked up at him with large intelligent eyes. It seemed to know him; that was true. It seemed to sense an affinity with him. Could it be an omen, a sign of things to be? He reached out and grasped the wolf’s collar. It was a braided leather of a sort he had never seen before. The animal stood quietly before him, as though awaiting inspection. It was a proud beast, quite unlike the mangy, lazy curs who belonged to the tribe. Makstarn felt a curious kinship for him; this was not an animal to be domesticated and put on a leash. This was a fiercely independent creature which chose to ally itself with men, not to be dominated by them.

“Well,” asked Jetarn, “what are we to do with the animal? If we go on feeding him, he’ll only keep hanging about, begging.”

“It is not your problem,” Makstarn said. “He has come to me.”

“It is our problem,” one of the older men corrected him. “You are of us, and thus he is of us, if you keep him.”

“But where did he come from?” one of the others asked. It was Remial, a survivor of another tribe; one who bore the heavy weight of the fact that he had escaped capture only by an act of cowardice. When he spoke, it was usually in half-apologetic tones; when he was excited, as he was now, he whined.

Makstarn ran his hand over the wolf’s heavy, shaggy coat. He sniffed. “By his dusty odor, I should guess he came from out of the desert.”

“Everyone knows nothing lives in the desert,” Jetarn said scornfully.

“Everyone knows that wolves do not live in these lands, either,” Makstarn replied coolly. “And since that is true, and you have proven he did not come from out of the desert, the problem is answered.”

“It is?”

“There is no wolf.” He laughed again, causing the wolf to prick its ears and look searchingly up at him. “And therefore, no problem.”

Rifka stood, pouting. “There is no talking to him.” She turned her back.

“Wait, Rifka! Where are you going?” Jetarn asked.

Makstarn felt a cold knife turn slowly in his stomach as he awaited her reply.

“To my mother’s tent,” she said with a toss of her head. “And you needn’t help me find the way.”

To that, Makstarn smiled.

“What shall I do with you, Wolf?” Makstarn asked quietly. They were alone before the embers of the fire; his mother had retired to the tent for the night.

A cooling northern breeze fanned his skin and set the coals to glowing more brightly. There were few sounds in the empty night. The wolf lay at his feet, its tail thumping rhythmically. It looked at him with knowing eyes.

“They won’t let me keep you. And besides, I don’t think you want to be kept. But what is it you want? Why did you come here? And why to me? Is it because I am different? But what can that mean to you?”

“Perhaps it is that you are part wolf yourself,” came Rifka’s close-by whisper.

He looked up, startled. The girl was standing just across the dying fire. She wore a loose sleeping robe draped across her shoulders. It fell straight from her breasts, leaving her lower body veiled in shadow. Makstarn felt his heart begin pounding. His mind slipped momentarily back to the way he had seen her earlier—with Jetarn. She had worn less then… but not so well.

“Why have you come?” he asked, afraid of the answer.

“I must talk with you.”

“Sit,” he nodded. The blanket covered the dewy grass.

She crossed around the fire and sat down on the blanket, but no closer to him than necessary.

“I have to know,” she said. “Are you going to tell?”

“Tell?”

“The Elders. About—me and Jetarn.”

“Shouldn’t I?”

Her eyes flashed, but he could not tell if she was angry, or holding back tears. “What do they expect?” she asked. “Why should we obey their stupid rules when they mean nothing any more?”

“It is still the rule.”

“I know! No one may marry or conceive a child within the tribe,” she said in bitter parody of old Hekmight’s voice. “We must always seek our mates within other tribes. Everyone, that is, but you! You’re different!”

He said nothing, holding his face wooden and impassive. It was something he’d learned long ago: not to betray emotions that might be used against him. At his feet, the wolf still thumped its tail, dog-like.

“But what good are such rules if we know no other tribes? Tell me that!”

“I did not make the rules,” he said.

“No, but you alone can benefit from them. You alone are not bound by them. Your blood is new blood, they say. So we girls should make a line before your tent?”

“You haven’t yet.”

“We never will! Who could sleep beside one so hairy and ugly? Who could bed with such an animal?”

“I used to be a toad,” he said tonelessly.

She gave a short, bitter laugh. “A conceited toad! You still are!”

“You are very adroit,” he said.

“What?”

“You are clever. You have chosen a clever method to seal my lips and keep me from talking.”

She sighed, and seemed to grow smaller.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Let me start again.”

“No,” he said, beginning to enjoy himself. “You’re not sorry. Why should we pretend you are? Why should we pretend you’ve not said the things you have?”

“You want me, don’t you?” she flared. “You want my body! You’ll tell on Jetarn, just to have me!”

He shook his head. It felt very heavy. “Who could want you?” he asked, tasting the lies as they formed in his mouth. “Who could bear your spiteful presence? Go away, Rifka. Go away and leave me alone. Go steal into Jetarn’s tent and make the sweet puppy happy. You disgust me.”

She leapt to her feet, then seemed caught by an internal struggle. “You—will you—will you tell?”

“That’s all you care about?”

She whirled, and suddenly the sleeping robe was in her hands, and her body was free. He stared up at her, at her youthful, slender body, golden-skinned in the light of the embers. He stared up at her and felt an impossible ache flood his body. Rifka! he wanted to shout. I want you! I love you! I need you! He said nothing.

“Can I buy your silence?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “I cannot be bought. Not by you.”

She flung the robe back over her shoulders, and his loins ached for the sight of her once more. “I think I shall ask Jetarn to kill you,” she said over her shoulder as she moved into the night.

Two hours later, Makstarn had gathered up his most precious possessions. He had his crossbow, and his knife, a knife he had found on one of his secret visits to the ruins of the city. He had made a pack of provisions that might last him a week if he ate sparingly, and he had a water skin. The pack he slung over his back, the cross-bow over it. The skin, full with cold spring water, he hung at his belt, balanced on the other side by his knife and the quiver of cross-bow bolts.

“Come, fellow,” he called softy to the wolf. The animal rose quickly, as though it had been waiting just this command.

Overhead, the Red Moon hung in the east. Ahead, to the west, were the mountains that rimmed the desert.

What was it Rifka had said? That perhaps he was part wolf himself? Had his father been equally so? They had both been dark; he was even covered with black curly hair like a wolf. And this wolf had come for him, out of the desert.

Out of the same desert from whi. . .