Ander - Part 6: Subchapter 84
84
Hezzi didn't understand what was going on. He had prepared himself for what was about to happen, or at least, he thought he had. He had seen this very night so many times in his dreams, ever since Ander first came to him and explained what he planned to do. He had seen the pass fill up with Wolves, flowing like a wild, snarling river. He had seen them crashing against the wall like waves. In the dream, he was always standing on top of the wall, just like he was right now, holding Renna to his side, keeping her safe, just like he was right now, looking down at a churning sea of bodies filled with hundreds of glowing red eyes and thousands of sharp fangs. He'd watch from on high as they crushed themselves against the wall, growling and snarling, reaching for him with long, curved claws. There were never any familiar faces in the dream, only the identical masks of monsters, over and over and over again. Mindless creatures with no desire other than to rip and tear and destroy and maim and kill.
But this was no dream. This was real life, and real life could be far worse than even the most terrible of nightmares. In nightmares, all the monsters were just that: monsters. They wore scary masks that made them faceless, nameless, even lifeless. But the Wolves down there in this mountain scar wore no masks. They were not the faceless monsters of his dreams. If only they were, then things would have been so much easier.
Dorin. He _knew_that Wolf. He had fought that Wolf. He had had the opportunity to kill that Wolf, and vice versa. He was a low Wolf, the kind of Wolf who would hold your arms behind your back while his buddies pummelled you from the front. He was the kind of Wolf who would hold a grudge, who would sneak around at night and prise the claws from your fingers if you got on his bad side. He was the kind of Wolf who would chase after you and your friends in the dark, who would cut your throat on nothing but the say-so of his beloved Chieftain. He was the kind of Wolf who... would stand up against his people? Against axes, spears and clubs? Who would face certain death just to send out one final message of defiance?
Hezzi didn't understand what was going on. What on earth happened over there while he was away?
Ivio. He was the kind of Wolf who would keep on stabbing a deer long after it was dead. He was the kind of Wolf who would go around the village, picking fights with bigger, tougher Wolves just to prove a point. He was the kind of Wolf who would rush in to murder an innocent while he was down, bleeding on the ground. But now he stood, growling against an entire army, holding hands with unlikely allies.
And all the others down there, too. Thoka, who would sooner wrest a piece of venison from an elderly she-wolf's hands and scarf it down right in front of her than lift a finger to help anyone other than himself. Yanek and Vekka, the same Wolves who would sometimes gang up on little kids just for the hell of it. Seffer and Denko, Wolves who liked to spend their free time up in the watchtowers, 'looking out' for potential danger, but actually just taking pot-shots at anything that moved outside the walls, whether it be game or Wolf.
They were all lined up down there, with their backs pressed against the wall, trying to protect them, putting their lives on the line for them, even when they knew it wouldn't do any good.
Hezzi didn't understand. This wasn't like his dreams at all, and that made it so much worse.
He held Renna tight and looked out over the darkness inside the pass. It was shifting, moving, breaking apart...
Renna's grip tightened around his arm. He could feel her shivering against his side and breathing in quick, harsh gasps. There was something in the haze of snow, a shadow coming closer and closer, a figure that... wasn't very big at all, actually.
Hezzi squinted into the night, confused by what he was seeing.
It was Metka, possibly the shortest she-wolf in the entire tribe, the one who'd always puff up her cheeks and stamp her feet whenever she was mistaken for a child (which was quite often). She once covered herself in mud and climbed all the way to the top of a pine tree to harvest honey for her little sisters. She looked so out of place down there, shivering in the snow with an axe in her hands.
She must have had the exact same thought, because she suddenly looked down at her weapon like she'd never seen its like in all her life. She let it roll across her fingers a little, watching as the feeble light of the torches played off the frosted blade. The look on her face was difficult to read; part confusion, part disgust, and maybe...
No, that couldn't be it. But the more Hezzi looked, the more convinced he became. That expression was almost identical to the one Renna's mother had worn just a while ago. It was a look of pure shame.
Metka looked back at the army she had come from, with their rows of spears stabbing the sky, then at the tiny row of Wolves lining the wall, with no weapons between them at all. Lastly, she looked down at her axe again, and slowly shook her head. Hezzi couldn't be entirely sure, but he thought she might be crying.
Without ceremony, she dropped the axe and it disappeared into the snow, with only the last few lengths of the handle sticking straight up into the air like a dead sapling.
She slowly walked the rest of the way towards the wall and fell in line beside Thoka, who was looking down at her with an odd little frown on his face. Noticing his gaze, she looked up at him, smiled wanly, and said, quite clearly: "I guess this means I'm sick, too, huh?"
Hezzi was still trying to figure out what she meant by that when yet another Wolf broke free of the pack, this one considerably larger.
"Hezzi, what's happening?" Renna asked, but Hezzi could only shake his head.
"I don't know..."
It was Ludo. Hezzi recognized him because he fancied himself an expert on rabbit stew and sometimes gave away free bowls in the village centre because he always made 'way too much' (although Hezzi suspected it probably had more to do with the fact that his cooking was so terrible his family couldn't stand to swallow the stuff).
He had a knife in each hand, and was turning them over and over, watching the way they gleamed in an eerily similar fashion to Metka.
"I never told anyone this, but..." It looked like he was speaking to the knives, but Hezzi thought it more probable he was speaking to everyone. Or maybe no one. "I never skin any of the conies I bring in. I always make my boy do it. One of his 'chores'. But the truth is... I make him do it because I hate skinning and cleaning! The way it just... peels right off, like some kind of fruit. I always imagine what that would feel like, if it was, you know, still alive. I know it's stupid, but I can't help it. I always think it would be cold, you know? I mean besides how much it would hurt. It would be real cold, to have no skin on. And... back when I was a kid..." He looked up, licked his lips, and then immediately looked back down again. "I killed this rabbit. A real fat one. So I took it home, like usual. I cut it open, like usual. But... inside..." He gagged, and Hezzi was positive he would just vomit right there in the snow, but he just shook his head and carried on, speaking quickly, as if trying to outrun his nausea instead of suppressing it. "There were babies in there! At least seven of the things! They were so small, tiny, all pink and bloody... more like mice than rabbits. They just came... falling out onto the table, and I just..." He gagged again and doubled over, pressing his hands against his mouth with the knife blades still protruding from his fists. It almost looked like he was kissing them.
Or about to kill himself with them.
After a while, he straightened up again. White vapour issued from his mouth in quick little bursts. "I could never look at rabbits the same way after that. Or any animal, really. I think half the reason I got mated was just so I wouldn't have to prepare my own meals anymore." He chuckled weakly, but it wasn't funny. "If I can't even cut open a rabbit, how the hell am I supposed to cut open a Fox or a Wolf? Does that make me weak? Does that make me sick? Heh. Probably. I don't know." He tossed his knives and they disappeared into the snow with a rather anti-climactic little fwump sound, leaving two slits behind that quickly got covered in a fresh layer of white powder, and the thought that nobody would ever see those knives again until spring popped into Hezzi's mind, carrying unexpectedly terrifying connotations in its wake.
Ludo came to the wall slowly, reluctantly, like a Wolf approaching his final judgement, knowing full well what the verdict would be. He turned around, spread his arms, shut his eyes tight and gritted his teeth, saying: "I'm just glad Nama and Sadiiq aren't here to see me being this stupid..."
Another Wolf stepped forth out of the churning masses, followed by another and another. They were no more than individual dots moving through the white nothingness of the storm, mere drops in a lake, but they were there, they were coming, and just seeing them pushing through the snow filled Hezzi with a sense of hope he hadn't even realized he had abandoned until just then. They dropped their weapons, leaving a smattering of clubs and axes and spears sticking out of the snow like a bizarre little forest, and lined up with the rest against the wall, some of them looking grim and resolute, others looking downright terrified.
Hezzi recognised them all: Somat, Neqo, Lomay, Edals, Wake, Dolo, Aster, Cirrah, Wolves he had known practically all his life, lining up against the wall, too many to keep track of! What started as a simple chain of seven or eight quickly grew past a dozen, then two dozen, until there were at least fifty of them, eying each other up and down, apparently just as surprised by each other's behaviour as the Foxes high above their heads. They elbowed each other and whispered in hush tones, asking if these were really the monsters they had been so afraid of, the ones who had come to rip open their throats and eat their children.
Hezzi turned to Ander, feeling true hope for the first time in ages, but one look at his brother's face was more than enough to kill the smile that had almost taken shape on his lips.
Ander wasn't looking straight down at the chain of Wolves at the base of the wall, but farther out, where the true threat still lay. And it was as Hezzi followed his gaze that he realized their situation had not improved at all. In fact, it might have gotten worse.
Much, _much_worse...
They were exactly like the monsters from his dream, but with one crucial difference. These monsters wore no masks. He knew them all. So what if fifty of them had thrown down their weapons? What were they to do about the nine hundred or so still remaining? Giant Wolves snarling up at the wall, adorned with tribal symbols of blood and war, impatiently twisting their grips on spears and clubs. They roared into the wind. They stomped through the snow with crushing feet. They stared at the Foxes lining the wall like prey, their eyes filled with hunger and hatred. And right at the forefront, staring up at them with the most hunger and hatred of them all...
To the tribe they were Shekka and Banno. They were the 'Empty One' and the 'Flavour of Death'. They were the witchdoctor and the strongest son. They were all of those things, yes, but to Hezzi they were simply his mother and brother.
Why were they still standing there? Why... why hadn't they joined with the others? Why were they still facing the wrong way? Renna's mother had seen the light, so why couldn't his own?
Sensing his distress, Renna squeezed his arm. "Hezzi?"
He shook his head, refusing to believe that anyone, even his own mother, could be so wilfully blind. There was a difference between being physically unable to see and refusing to see, and that's what she was doing right now! Refusing to see!
"Mother!" he screamed into the wind, cupping his hands around his mouth. "Mother, what are you doing!?"
She narrowed her eyes and bared her fangs and, even though Hezzi couldn't hear it, he was positive she was growling at him.
"What is wrong with you!?" It was a question he never would have dared to ask her in his old life, but he was...
He was different now.
And suddenly he understood. He knew why Mother was behaving this way. He had gone through the exact same thing. He had been consumed by the same anger, the same grief, the same burning hatred.
I used to be like that, Hezzi thought in amazement, remembering the night of Ander's trial, just before his brother came walking through the gates. Oh, how he had begged Father to let him join the warpath, to let Mother mark him with the symbols of revenge. How angry he was back then, how furious, how blind. He had wanted nothing more than to get his hands around Ander's neck and choke the life right out of him. In his mind, that had been the right thing to do. That had been the just thing to do. He could still feel the moment of release when he snapped Ander's carving in two. He could still feel the jagged, wooden splinters pushing into his palm. Just like that little wooden carving, he himself had been broken in two.
Just like Mother was broken right now.
Hezzi gripped his head, feeling like the whole thing was about to split wide open. He saw all of this, thought all of this, in a matter of seconds. He knew what true horror was, and the undefined fear he used to feel whenever he was forced to look into those milky eyes, or when he had to cover up his disgust at her touch to lead her around the village, didn't come close to that. Watching your loved ones suffer and die, that was true horror. He watched Banno disappear into the river, leaving only a dark trail of blood behind. He watched Ander disappear into the mist, each laboured step marked by a bloody footprint. He watched his father draw his last breath in a tent that reeked of sickness and rot. He could not go through something like that again, and neither could she! That was the root of it all, the reason why she was so angry and hateful, why she would go so far for vengeance.
Because she loved her family.
She just didn't know that, in trying to bring them back, she was actually tearing them apart.
Hezzi turned to Ander with tears in his eyes, knowing that the end would come soon, and that this would be his last chance to change it.
"Ander, please..." he said. "Don't blow on that horn!"
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