NOT ALL WOLVES

I got the idea for this one looking out the kitchen window while I was doing the dishes. If s far from the only story notion that’s come to me in an unexpected place while I was doing something that wasn’t even remotely connected to writing. The trick is to get the idea down on paper before you lose it again. “Not All Wolves” is a story of man’s inhumanity to man, among other things.

Archbishopric of Cologne: 1176

A full moon hung in the clear dark sky. Dieter ran through the streets of Cologne. Mud splashed under the pads of his feet. It flew up to stick in lumps in the matted fur of his tail. He turned sharply and dashed down a narrow, stinking alley.

Much too close behind turn, someone cried, “There he goes! That way!” A score of men or more were hunting him. Their high, excited shouts reminded him of the baying of wolves.

Had he been in his own familiar body, he might have laughed, or cried, or both at once. In the wolf’s shape he wore, he could only whimper. He tried to run faster.

Torches appeared at the mouth of the alley, casting a flickering light down its length. Dieter’s eyes saw that only as brighter grayness. A wisp of breeze brought him the smell of torch-smoke, and of his pursuers. He could smell their fear, and their resolve.

The men knew nothing of the wondrous things his nose told him, any more than a deaf man could follow a minnesinger’s song. But their eyes, now, were keener than his; they were many; and they could plan. More shouts rang out:

“There he is!” “Which way did he turn?” “To the left!” “No, to the right, you idiot!” “Yes, to the right! I saw him too!” “Klaus, Joachim, and Hans, up to the street of the tailors, and quickly! Don’t let the cursed beast get through that way!”

And one more cry over and over again: “Kill the werewolf!”

It’s not my fault, Dieter wanted to explain. I do no harm. But when he opened his wolfs jaws, only a wolf’s growl came out.

And those wolfs jaws, he could not deny, held a full set of wolf’s teeth. He could feel them, jagged against his tongue, which hung from the side of his mouth as he panted in the air he needed to run and run and run.

Inside the body of a wolf, though, he kept the wits he had had as a boy. If the street of the tailors was still unblocked, he might yet break away from the pack yes, that was the proper word, he thought at his heels.

Too late, too late! He heard Klaus, Joachim, and Hans beat him to the comer. They all carried torches; two had clubs, and the other a woodcutter’s ax. They looked this way and that. Good, Dieter thought. They did not know he was close by. They were only three, after all, not twenty. He sprang at them.

Two screamed like lost souls and fled. The third had more courage in him. His club thudded against Dieter’s ribs. Pain flared, then died. Dieter’s flesh mended with unnatural speed. Had the fellow thought to swing the torch, though, he might have done true harm.

Dieter gave him no chance to think of that. He snarled horribly and ran by. He was ahead of his pursuers again. But he was not free of them, as he had hoped. The brave man pounded after him, yelling. His cries, and the shrieks the other two were letting out, were sure to draw the rest of the mob.

All Dieter wanted was a place to be left alone to wait out the night. Come morning, he knew, he would be himself again: thirteen, an orphan, making his living as best he could, doing odd jobs for weavers and tanners, enamelers and smiths.

Was it four months ago the change first came on him? Other changes had started not long before then. His voice bad begun to crack and to deepen. Fine, fuzzy down appeared on his cheeks. The second- and third-hand tunics and breeches he wore seemed suddenly to bind, and to leave him bare at the wrists and ankles.

Every lad he knew went through those changes. But not every lad he knew turned into a wolf when the moon was full.

The first time it happened, by luck Dieter had been alone. Even after he struggled out of the clothes that no longer fit his new shape, he did not realize fully what he was. It was not until he changed back at sunrise and saw the wolf’s prints in the dirt of the empty stable where he’d spent the night did he begin to understand. And with understanding came fear.

The next night of the full moon, and the one after that, he had sought out deserted places to wait through the change. When he was a wolf, he had no urge to tear the throat out of every man and beast he saw; past stealing a flitch of bacon, he had gone hungry on nights the change struck him. He also had no illusions about the townsfolk believing that.

He had been on his way to hide this time, too. But that fat fool of a swordsmith had kept him working late, and the moon rose while he was still on the street.

A woman screamed. He could not really blame her. Had he seen someone turn from boy to wolf before his eyes, he thought he would have screamed himself. The hunt had been on ever since.

“Kill the werewolf!”

He was growing heartily tired of that cry. But the one that came after it made the hair along his spine stand up: “Aye, burn it in the old market square in front of Saint Martin’s church, as we did the wizard last year!”

The crowd, people said, had jammed the square. Dieter had not gone himself. He had no stomach for such spectacles. He had not escaped it altogether, though; the stench of burnt flesh lingered for days in front of the church. Even then, he had taken more notice of smells than most folk. No wonder, he thought.

He imagined himself-in wolf’s shape or boy’s, it would not matter-tied to a stake, with little yellow flames licking through the fagots toward his tender flesh. He threw back his head and howled, a long cry of fear and desolation.

The shouts behind him redoubled. Dogs yelped frantically. Lights appeared in windows as people fetched lamps or candles from beside their beds to try to see what was going on.

Some of them, Dieter knew, would join the chase. He should have kept quiet. But the mere idea of burning had ripped the wail from him. By God, they would not bum him!

By God! Hope ran through him. It was dizzying, so much so that he almost stumbled into a pile of garbage at the edge of the street. Surely a priest could lift this curse from him!

He seldom went to church. He had to worry about keeping his belly, if not full, then at least with something in it-on Sunday no less than any other day. But he knew where every church in the town was. They were likely places for work-and handouts.

Even had he been next door to Saint Martin’s, he would not have gone there, not after the shouts of burning him in front of it. But Saint Martin’s lay close by the Rhine, far away from the ancient maze of streets through which he was running. This central part of Cologne, he had heard, went back to the legendary days of Rome.

Of Rome he knew nothing save the name. He did know he was near the church of Saint Cacilien. If none of the men who hunted him was waiting down this street-

None was. He turned right, then left. There stood Saint Cacilien’s church, its doors open to the needy. No one, Dieter thought, had ever been more needy than he. He climbed awkwardly up the stairs-stairs were made for creatures with two legs, not four-and into the church.

It looked different from the way he remembered, and not just because he was seeing it only in shades of gray. Now his eyes were also lower to the ground. The pews seemed a forest around him.

In boy’s shape, too, he hardly noticed the incense in the air. It was just part of how churches smelled. As a wolf, though, the bitterness of myrrh and frankincense’s sharp spicy scent made his nose twitch and tingle. He gasped, then sneezed once, twice, three times.