WOLFWEIR Page 6
He waved Lucia to him. They crouched together by the heavy sliding door, Alphonse gripping his sword cane in one hand and Lucia's arm in the other.
The train had now stopped moving completely. They could hear voices. Then the lock clunked, and the door slid wide --
And the railroad worker stepped back, his mouth agape in shock, as a little boy and a young girl sprang from the baggage car.
The little boy wore a beret and a stylish aviator's jacket and clunky brand new hiking boots, and was carrying a silver tipped cane. His movements were oddly jerky, like a marionette's. The little girl was clad in a sheepskin coat and a red scarf and snow boots.
They hit the frozen ground running. They dashed away from the train, Alphonse in the lead, tugging on Lucia's gloved hand.
She was having trouble running in her new boots. Every few steps she sank up to her knees in the soft deep snow.
A whistle shrilled. A border guard unslung his rifle and raised it in the direction the railroad worker pointed, but he couldn't see anything to shoot at. The sun hadn't risen over that part of the mountain yet.
He fired a crisp shot at the dark pine woods anyhow. The cracking report echoed back and forth between the peaks.
"Oh Alphonse! They're shooting at us," Lucia gasped.
Alphonse tugged hard on her sleeve. She was wading in a deep snowdrift. They'd reached the dark eaves of the forest. Alphonse pulled harder, and Lucia, sliding and puffing in the snow, followed him into the pines.
They stopped and looked back. The railroad worker was gesturing and pointing like an actor in a silent movie. The guard looked bored. Finally, with a shrug, he slung the rifle on his shoulder again and walked back toward the station.
Lucia laughed, covering her mouth with a gloved hand. Alphonse reached up and brushed snow from her hair.
"So far we are good," said Lucia. "No?"
(Alphonse thinking, grimly: Maybe so, if you don't freeze to death in these mountains.)
Fire
Alphonse took Lucia's gloved hand and they moved staggeringly in a crooked line uphill through the drifts of snow between the dark pines. It was morning and the sun was rising but Lucia's teeth still chattered from the searing cold. There was a little less snow deeper in the pines and then they were going up the mountain steeply and every so often Lucia had to stop and bend over gasping for breath. Wind scoured the mountain and made the pines roar. Whenever the wolf-girl staggered puppet Alphonse seized her arm and tried to steady her but sometimes despite his best efforts she fell in the soft cold snow, taking him down with her, only to rise puffing, myriad snow crystals in her eyebrows and her golden hair. Oh hair of spun gold, thought puppet Alphonse. Even in this direst of situations he could feel himself beginning to love her.
Alphonse swatted aside hanging pine branches with his sword cane, dusting them both with snow-fluff as they staggered and wrenched their way up the mountain. At last they emerged from the tree line and there on a crag up ahead in the dazzling sunlight stood a square stone mountain shelter for hikers and ski-ers, capped with two feet of snow. They made haste for it, Lucia gasping and puffing, the puppet boy that was Alphonse trotting behind her turning his head left and right and once even all the way around to make sure they were alone on this part of the mountain.
No gendarmes, hunters, woodsmen, hikers -- no people at all anywhere but for themselves. Empty, craggy, snow-dusted, wind-scoured vastness.
It was a small dark and dingy shelter and the wind howled in its eaves. A battered tin bucket in the corner served -- a whiff was enough to confirm this thought -- for a toilet. The beds were just wooden benches along the wall. But there was a box of dry tinder and a small stack of split firewood next to a cast iron potbelly stove. Alphonse got to work with his flint and steel and quickly got a fire snapping. They sat by it shivering, bathing in the waves of heat, as the snow melted from Lucia's eyebrows and tangled hair.
**
Puppet boy Alphonse scuttled outside the climber's hut to look around. To the side of the hut, next to the heaped woodpile under the eaves, he found a pair of old wooden skis, both warped. There were no poles to go with the skis. He tucked them under his stick-arms and walked back around the house and stepped inside. Lucia was hugging her knees and gazing into the flames through the little iron grate. A soft smile on her lips, she wasn't shivering anymore. Alphonse dropped the skis with a clatter.
"Hurrah," Lucia said, the dark joy-light coming back into her eyes. "Off we go, Alphonse. We'll ski 'till dark and camp someplace. Right?"
Alphonse dipped his chin. Right. It was time to get cracking. Wolfweir awaits, he thought. Some wicked Vampyres are in desperate need of killing. He would kill them. Maybe with the help of this Were-wolf lord Gar Frith, maybe all by his little wooden puppet boy lonesome.
**
They trekked, sometimes carrying their skis, sometimes ski-ing, using pine branches for poles. The snow was deep and the mountain winds bitter cold and Lucia’s teeth chattered. Alphonse took off all his clothes and put them on her, bundled her up in them, while he ski-ed through that raging Alpine wilderness naked, a stick-like puppet boy with painted eyes.
They moved on across mountain passes and glacial wastes until dark and Lucia, her teeth chattering, said she felt they were almost there, Wolfweir was nearby, just beyond that next peak probably.
Yet Alphonse saw how she was shaking. He knew she wouldn't survive the night without a fire. He led her to the base of a crag that blocked some of the wind and blowing snow. Alone, he walked down to the treeline -- it wasn't so far now, since they'd crossed the highest country and come down on the other side of a great pass -- and gathered dead sticks in his arms. He wasn't cold but fear made him shake when he thought that Lucia might freeze solid tonight. No. He'd make such a roaring bonfire --
Such were the thoughts jumping nervously in his puppet head. He had to make two more trips to the treeline after he struck flint and steel and got the fire going, singeing himself a little in the process, Lucia first laughing at his torch-dance as he shook his flaming hand, then realizing the fire could consume him entirely and helping to put the blazing arm out with handfuls of snow. She then squatted beside the fire wrapped in all their coats, still shuddering and now snow-caked.
He trudged back and forth twenty eight times with wood in his arms. Dumping it on the fire. Making it roar and crackle. Until the pale Lucia stopped shivering and began to bathe in the warmth.
"Ah. Wonderful, Alphonse."
**
He wasn't tired. His puppet body couldn't tire any more than it could freeze, no matter how his pine wood limbs snapped and creaked. But there was now a big enough wood pile to last the night. He thumped down next to Lucia and gazed up at the stars. The Alpine night sky, starry beyond belief.
"Are we close to heaven, Alphonse? Is that how high we are? Could you touch that star if you tried?"
Lucia was chattering away now, like a bird. A laughing bird. But soon she fell asleep by the fire.
Jarvis and Gund
The puppet boy falls into a trance, staring into the wreathing flames. He does not know how much time has passed, but he now feels himself suddenly, treacherously lifted by the puppet arms.
Clamped in an unwavering hold, he is raised up above the fire, toward the star-dazzled sky.
He struggles, he jerks, he rattles -- to no avail.
There are two assailants, he senses, though they say nothing. Their silence is grim and determined. Swiftly and silently, his arms are bound tight to his puppet body with a thick length of frayed rope.
Border police? What? Huh?
He tries to shout a warning, an alarum to wake the slumbering Lucia, but his pine jaws only go click clack.
Then his head is stuffed into a burlap bag, and the stars go out, and the fire disappears too, but for an orange blur.
**
The two chuckling poachers drop puppet boy Alphonse into the soft snow. He's still wriggling and jerking, kicking his wooden legs, b
ut his arms are bound, and his puppet head is in a bag. No threat, this little magic wooden boy. They'll deal with him later. They turn in greedy unison to gaze down at the sleeping china-skinned blonde-girl. Their leathery, bearded faces crack in toothless grins.
The poachers are brothers who never went to school, never married, and rarely take baths. Their parents are long dead, and never mourned. Their names are Jarvis and Gund. They've lived up here with only each other for company for so long that they have both gone slightly mad.
For the first half of their lives, Jarvis and Gund made a precarious living shooting and skinning small animals and selling the skins for brandy. But one night two years ago they waylaid some hikers from France, killing them after having had their fun, and discovered a fresh and unique source of pleasure in life.
**
Alphonse, whipping his head back and forth in the bag, hears Jarvis and Gund grunting with anticipation, and he bites into the greasy burlap and begins tugging at it with his teeth just as Lucia's voice, frightened and shrill and protesting, breaks the deep Alpine silence. He hears men's rough voices, laughter, and Lucia lets out a scream. Then another, this one almost a howl. It's not full moon. She won't turn into a wolf. This is the howl of a little girl in pain.
He rolls over onto his stomach in the snow. He can feel the heat of the fire. It's right next to him. He tries to snap the rope but it's too tough.
The fire. Naturallement, thinks Alphonse. He rolls over a few times, and he's in the flames.
It's not too painful. He can feel his puppet body starting to burn -- a weird sensation -- as he rubs the thickest section of the rope in the hot pine coals.
**
Meantime, Jarvis is holding Lucia's head, pushing it back into the snow, as she tries and fails to bite his hand.
Gund is ripping away at the last bits of clothing that cover Lucia's warm body.
He's grunting like a pig. The girl's warm scent rises to his nostrils, causing him to slobber a little. His brown tobacco laced spit drips into the girl's bare, undeveloped chest.
Jarvis is chuckling. He's seen it and done it all before with the murderous and cheerful Gund. But this one, mon Dieu, this one is an appetizing little mouthful. This one's golden shock of hair, her pale virginal skin, the way she jerks and writhes in protest as the dark leathery hands fondle her -- it's more intoxicating than a barrel of young brandy. He can hardly wait to get his turn.
Fixated on the frantic Lucia, they don't smell the rope -- or the gaudy puppet boy -- burning.
**
Alphonse rolls frantically about in the coals until he feels the rope snap.
Then he jumps up, crowned with fire. Ripping the blazing burlap bag from his head.
He steps out of the bonfire, snatches up his swordcane from the snow, draws the sparkling rapier, and rushes at the bunched, writhing dark shapes at the edge of the lurid firelight.
**
Gund is trying to find the place between the girl's kicking legs to do what he wants to do when he feels a kind of prick in his back that turns into a lancing pain, far worse even than being stung by a hornet, which was until now almost the worst thing he ever felt.
Glancing down, he sees the point of something metal sticking out of his chest. Then there is an stream of blood, almost an eruption, and the blood-drops fall from the point and spatter the girl's bared stomach.
Wah? he cries, his voice coming short and hard.
The steel point -- it was, he realizes with horror, the point of a sword -- disappears as if by magic, and a gout of blood leaps out.
Gund tries to catch it in his hands. Tries to hold it in. Gets dizzy. Tottering from side to side.
The girl gets her legs free and kicks him, and he sprawls backward into the deep soft snow, his mouth open, gazing wildly at the stars.
**
After pulling his rapier free of Gund, Alphonse, still burning, rushes at Jarvis.
The big, bearded man stands up as Alphonse dives at him. He feels the sword stab into his thigh. Howling, he strikes out like a windmill, and one of his fists hits Alphonse's burning head. The puppet boy tumbles over and over in the snow.
Jarvis throws himself at the smoking wooden boy. As they tumble over and over, the last flickers of flame on Alphonse go out. Lucia pulls on her trousers and a shirt and rushes after the tumbling pair. Jarvis is smashing at Alphonse with his fists.
ALPHONSE! screams Lucia, caught in this horrible dark waking nightmare.
**
They tumble into the fire. They are both ablaze, in a halo of flames. Then they roll out of it. Jarvis is howling curses as he batters the puppet.
Lucia espies the glint of metal in the snow. The rapier. She snatches it up and leaps over the fire.
Sees Jarvis throttling Alphonse. His wooden eyes rolling in his pine puppet head. If he were a real boy, his face would by now be black.
Luckily, that's not the case.
Lucia shrieks and, clutching the pommel in both fists, thrusts the blade through Jarvis's neck from behind. The sword point sticks in Alphonse's forehead. Blood splatters his painted marionette face.
Jarvis lets out a dying rattle.
Lucia wrenches the blade free and, with another scream, hacks the grizzled poacher's head clean off his shoulders.
The bearded head rolls into the soft snow, trailing blood. The body, shooting twin blood-geysers from the neck, sways and falls sideways.
Lucia tosses the sword aside. Alphonse, his arms still smoking from the fire, leaps up like a hero. Ready to go on with the fight.
"Ah, sweet Alphonse!" she shouts, hugging him harder than she's ever hugged any being.
He's just cold fire-blackened wood, true, but the boy's spirit is still there. She can feel it. She hears his pine-wood eyelids click. She feels his arms grasp her, the wooden fingers stroking her snow-crusted hair.
Skiing
Alphonse stacks more pine branches on the fire and he and Lucia wait, shivering, for the sky to lighten a little. To drown the starry sky.
After a time, Lucia falls asleep with her head on Alphonse's wooden knee, clutching him like a doll.
She's wearing all her clothes and his, including the coats, gloves, and both caps -- even his gum soled and cleated hiking boots.
The wooden boy sits watch on the night. Gazing into the darkness beyond and to all sides of their snapping and popping fire, he sometimes glances up at the Milky Way, that breathtaking star river, and his eyelids click back in his head and his painted mouth gapes in awe.
O magic. O purity.
**
Holding a dueling pistol in each hand, Alphonse is now primed and ready for anything at all to rush at them from out of the freezing darkness. Wolves, bears, poachers -- it doesn't matter. His guns are loaded and the powder-and-shot bag lies ready at his feet next to his father's Toledo sword cane. He'll shoot, stab and hack his way through a thousand enemies to protect the little wolf-girl.
Bit by bit, the puppet boy stops cursing himself for his trance-state that allowed the two poachers to creep up to the fire unseen and unheard. Done is done. You can't take anything back from the past, so look only to what's coming at you from the future.
He spares little thought for Jarvis and Gund, those bloody frozen corpses now stretched out in the snow like herrings packed in the ice hold of a fishing trawler.
Serves them both right, the swine. Even if Alphonse could weep tears, he wouldn't. Not for that vile, murderous scum.
And in time, he vows to the starry night, the loathsome Vampyres Lord and Lady Blackgore will get just what the poachers got.
**
Dawn. Ringing silence. Unbearable splendor. Wind blowing ghost-eddies of powder snow from the stark mountain peaks.
The sun breaks over the cloud-banked horizon and rises with slowness and majesty -- brilliant red then luminous orange.
Ah! cries Lucia, sitting up crusted with snow to gaze into the light, tears shining in her blue eyes.
**
Lucia skis easily, golden hair tucked under her cap, smiling at the brilliant mountains all around. Alphonse, because of his clacking marionette limbs, is a little clumsy.
As they ski, the sun warms them. There are no sounds but the soft hissing of the polished hardwood skis in deep snow, the wind rushing in tall pine trees, and icemelt water dripping into the deep crevasses.
Ecstasy. This is the life, thinks Alphonse. As long as they can avoid starting an avalanche --