The Wolves of Sanctus Terre

The Wolves of Sanctus Terre: In the Beginning was the Word

"Arrrghhhooorrroooooaghhh!!!!" The man's final cry wasn't human. It was something feral, something desperate. The voice of the human soul was utterly absent from it. 

"Get back! Back, you mangy curs! Gerrout! Go!"

Soldiers. Clubs. Swords. The scent of desert, sweat, and death. The wolves, who had found Golgotha to be a well-stocked homestead, fled, yipping and yawping, tails down, ears back, the youngsters roughhousing, to break up the tensions inspired by the hostile humans, guarding their dying trophy.  From the hillside, a man put his arm around a woman's shoulders. She was watching the wolves, weeping.

"They look so harmless, just as he did...And they would kill them, too, wouldn't they, these foreign devils?"

"Hush, Mary... the Romans are mostly good to us. I... I should have spoken with him....warned him... "

"What he said, what he did - it was right, John, all of it. It was right."

"I know, but when you are right, sometimes you must also be careful.  Look, they've turned to their sport, now - the wolves are coming back - shall we see if we can get a little closer?"

"They'll drink...."

"The blood? Yes. It is nature - they do it all the time, with the crucifixions here. It's why they choose to live here, I suppose - blood, and the remnants of food that the crowds bring when they come to watch the killings.  Plus it's not the city - there's probably other wildlife that we won't see, but the wolves will."

"I don't mind that they drink his blood...it's almost as though, if they do...he lives on, you understand? Becomes part of the wolf."  The woman turned, silently watching the crouching, creeping wolves as they lapped their fill behind the very backs of the soldiers who had, moments earlier, so violently driven them away. Those same soldiers were now focused on their games of chance, gambling for the clothing of the men whose lives they had ended.

The man spoke to the woman in a whisper. "Which wolf do you think he will become, Mary?"

She studied them for a moment, the larger group of five or six, lapping her son's blood as the remaining three pack members drifted between the other two men, hanging limp and lifeless either side of her boy.

Her boy. Had he ever really been hers? Sometimes, it hadn't seemed so - that was why Joseph wasn't here. After that time at the Temple, in Jerusalem, the worry on the long journey back, the exhaustion of retracing their steps, the way they'd heard their son speak to the Rabbis... Joseph hadn't been the same since that day. Hadn't felt the same about the boy. He had quietly left her when she began following her son as he started his work as a Rabbi - an itinerant, as almost all were who were not bequeathed to a Temple at birth - and, in the last three years, she hadn't really thought of him at all.

A large, pure white wolf raised its head, gazing out across the valley for a long moment, then, with the subtlest shift of posture, as it turned, it seemed to call the others to its side. By the time the soldiers looked up from their game, the wolves were almost out of sight.

The woman smiled as she looked at the young man beside her, the man who looked so much like her son, who her son, it seemed, had tasked with taking care of her.

"I think he will become part of the white wolf - the good, strong, pure wolf."

The man smiled. "So do I, Mary. So do I."

                                                     *******************

That night, when the crowds and the soldiers had gone, and the bodies had been taken down, the wolves emerged once more from their den, this time ignoring the high hill, and heading instead for a newly-ploughed field, where they could smell a body, freshly buried in a shallow grave.

The body was that of another man, free of blood, and whole, for he had taken his own life cleanly. The large white wolf sniffed the air, paced, sniffed the ground, and began digging. With a yip, he summoned two of the pack to his side.  Soon, earth and paws were flying, and, in moments, the body emerged, at once grabbed in strong jaws, teeth and eyes flashing in the moonlight. The youngest and smallest of the pack lay down at the edges of the field, waiting until their leader and his chosen ones were done, when they would be permitted whatever was left. It was a way that wild things had, of ensuring that their numbers never exceeded what the land and its resources could support. Some young always died before they became adults - malnutrition, fights, hunters - there were many dangers to a wild thing that lived by its instincts alone, without human awareness or intelligence.  But, then, things were not always safe for humans, either, so all in all the world balanced itself out.

If the wolves had had human sentience, they may have paused at the slightly strange taste of the flesh of the man's hands. They may have wondered whether they should eat these strange-smelling parts of him.

But they did not have human sentience, and, after a pause to sniff for the poisons they knew, they had felt no cause for alarm, and had feasted well.

Inside the white wolf, and the five strongest adults - his Mate, his Beta, a young adult male, and two young adult females - the silver dust that had tainted this dead man's hands was already encountering the blood of that other man, mingling both with that and with the wolves' blood, working a subtle, irrevocable kind of magic under the guidance of the full moon.  Within a month, these wolves would no longer be only wolves. Within a month, under a different full moon, they would become both less and more than they had been born to be.

The wolves rested.  The full moon bathed them all in its glow. The magic that was newly in them responded, working out its own, subtle yet certain destiny.

Around them, the night noises continued as though nothing were amiss.