Chapter 67: Wolf Songs

Herrwn retreated to his quarters after a midday meal he barely tasted. He spent the next hours in solitude, reciting the lines of the final episode in the epic of the wandering minstrel. It was not a saga he had chosen for any particular reason, other than that it was traditionally told at the end of summer so its conclusion would coincide with the celebration of the start of the fall harvest—an occasion on which the Songs of Melamardd, the fabled bard for whom the tale was named, were sung.

Now he found himself deriving hope from the reminder that earlier generations of Druids had sent their sons on quests for mystical insight and had lost hope of their ever returning, but Melamardd had—and so might Caelym.

All the priests and priestesses were in their places when Herrwn made his entrance into the main hall that night. Only his own chair and Caelym’s were vacant.

Receiving Feywn’s nod, he began.

In the high, shining hall of the realm of King Maeclwdden of the Kingdom of Llancerddysul, there was a great gathering of those who had come together in final lamentations for the king’s youngest son, Melamardd, from whom there had been no word for seven years and now was to be mourned as dead.

A bard of the highest order, Herrwn spoke the narrator’s lines as if he were seeing the events unfold before his eyes. As each mourner rose to speak, he became that person—the queen recalling how she’d cradled her last-born and most beloved infant in her arms, the king as he recounted the childhood feats that had set his favorite son apart from his six brothers, each of those brothers admitting their envy and wishing for the chance to make amends, each of Melamardd’s seven lovers recalling his ardor and forswearing their former jealousy to be sisters-in-mourning.

He had reached the climax of the final scene—the moment at which the darkly shrouded woman (previously only noted in passing as a dark figure sitting in the shadows) rises up from her stool and throws back her shawl to reveal Herself to be the Great Goddess.

Speaking in the narrator’s awed voice, he said, “As She reached out her snow-white arms, the hall’s golden doors swung open and—”

And at that moment the curtains of the entry to the hall parted and a tall figure, clad in furs and carrying a stained, battered satchel over his shoulder, stepped through.

He was almost unrecognizable. His hair was tangled and matted. His dark eyes glowed in the light of the hearth the way Herrwn imagined the eyes of a wild animal glowed in the forest at night. And when Caelym spoke, his words came out in an oddly warbling tone much like the voice Herrwn used when he recited the part of Namurran, the king of the wolves, in the second saga in the epic of Fondelwn and the Fairy Queen.

    “If she who speaks through our great oracle is listening,” Caelym began, “let her hear how I have done as she decreed, how I have found my animal spirit guide and how I have learned to speak the language of its tribe! And then”—he took the sagging, lumpy pouch off his shoulder and let it drop by his feet—“I will sing you their songs and tell you their stories!”

Stepping around the pack as though it were a rock in a stony mountain path and shivering in an imaginary wind, he pulled his fur cloak close around him. His teeth chattering, he described how he had climbed to the top of a peak in the northern mountains and heard the howls of wolves coming from a distant ridge.

“It was then I knew what animal was to be my spirit guide, and so”—he cast a resolute look around the room—“I set out to find their pack and fulfill my quest.”

With that he pulled up his hood and began to pace, crisscrossing the chamber, leaning forward and backward as he mimed his climb up one ridge and down another. Coming to a sudden halt, he ducked behind a vacant chair, peeked over the top of it, and whispered, “After days of searching, I came to a rise, and there, in the valley below, I saw seven silver-gray wolves racing after a herd of deer, cutting out the hindmost and bringing it down,” in a voice that carried both admiration for the wolves and grief for the deer.

Slowly, warily, he crept out from behind the chair and around the edge of the room, all the while describing how he followed the pack for weeks, spying on them to learn how they spoke to one another. Reaching another empty chair, he stopped again, crouched, and then rose just enough to peer at a spot in the center of the chamber floor as he told them how, on the day of the summer solstice, a light brown wolf he’d never seen before came out of the bushes and trotted toward the place where the pack was resting in the shade after their most recent kill.

“Smaller by half than any of the gray wolves, most likely the lost or orphaned cub of some other pack, it was too young and weak to fend for itself and too inexperienced to know the danger when the entire enemy pack rose as one and stalked toward it. As the pack surrounded it, the largest male in the lead, the little brown wolf dropped, rolled over on its back, and exposed its neck and belly as if surrendering to death. The great gray wolf drew back his lips in a fearsome snarl and closed his teeth on the pup’s throat. The pup made no move save for a small wag at the tip of its tail. I watched with tears welling up in my eyes for the poor, doomed pup—but instead of biting down, the great gray wolf released his grip and walked away. The rest of the pack followed him, and the little brown wolf got back to its feet and crept along after them with its tail now wagging happily, even tucked as tightly as it was between its legs. And so the next day …”

Caelym crept out from behind the chair—stooped over, so it looked as if he were moving on four feet—and eased his way into the center of the room as he told how he, too, had bowed down to the leader of the wolves and had, likewise, been taken into the pack.

Shifting from cowering to exuberant, and interspersing his words with barks and whines, yips and yowls, he acted out how he had spent the rest of the summer living with the wolves—sleeping in their dens, wrestling with their cubs, joining in their hunts, sharing in their kills, and howling along as they sang their songs to the moon. For most of the time he was speaking, he moved crouched over, darting and bounding from one place to another, but then, upon reaching a group of chairs that his audience had come to understand as the ridgetop where the wolves sang at night, he froze in place, hesitantly lifted up his head and turned it, sniffing, listening …

“As the days grew shorter, there was something—an elusive scent carried on a chill breeze or the cry of birds flying south—that told them it was time to leave their summer abode in the high mountain valleys and journey down to their winter home. I might have gone along with them except that I, too, heard a call, equally compelling, to return to you, my human kin, and live again as a man.”

As he spoke these last lines, Caelym slowly straightened up to stand erect, his gaze fixed in the direction the pack had gone.

Like the rest of the gathered priests and priestesses, Herrwn was held spellbound by Caelym’s tale, so it took him a moment to realize the boy was finished.

As the shrine’s chief priest and master bard, it was Herrwn’s duty to welcome his disciple back and make the formal announcement that, having completed his spirit quest, Caelym was now a full-fledged high priest, with all the privileges and obligations that entailed. He would have been both proud and honored to do so—but Feywn spoke first, making that precise pronouncement with an undertone of warmth he’d not heard in her voice since Rhedwyn’s death.

Feywn’s declaration was followed by a spate of toasts and speeches, so it was well past midnight before Herrwn and Olyrrwd, with Caelym between them, made their way back to their sleeping quarters.

Though obviously exhausted, Caelym balked at getting into bed. Instead, he drew his tattered fur cloak around him and went out into the courtyard, where he circled the garden bench three times before crawling under it, curling up into a ball, and going to sleep.

As Herrwn was about to kneel down and coax Caelym inside, Olyrrwd, who until then had said nothing except, “Hello, Caelie, nice to have you home,” whispered, “Leave him be for now.”

Taking that as a healer’s instruction, Herrwn followed Olyrrwd back into their sleeping chamber, where he spent what was left of the night drifting in and out of very odd dreams about being a wolf running at the head of a howling pack.