Nathan did not know how long he sat beneath the night sky before he realised that he had been listening to the mountain breathe.
At first he mistook it for wind. The sound came and went so faintly that it seemed to belong to the grass whispering between the rocks or to the distant scrape of grit sliding down the mountainside, and because those were ordinary sounds he accepted them without thought. He needed ordinary things just then. He needed the cold beneath him to be stone and the darkness around him to be nothing more than the absence of daylight. He needed the stars to be stars. Above all, he needed the mountain behind him to be a mountain, an enormous dead thing made of rock and pressure and the accumulated silence of ages, because there had already been enough living things beneath it.
The difficulty was that Nathan knew better.
There was moisture moving far below him.
He could feel it.
Not hear it. Not imagine it. Feel it in the same quiet, intimate fashion that a man might feel blood move through a numb hand when sensation began returning to the fingers. Water seeped through hairline fractures in stone and passed across something soft, something vast and living where no living thing should have remained. There were minute changes in pressure as underground channels opened and narrowed. Tiny organisms moved through dark water. Roots had worked their way down from somewhere far above, questing blindly through cracks, and when the finest of them touched the red mass beneath the mountain Nathan knew the touch as surely as if someone had brushed the back of his own hand.
He stopped breathing.
The sensation went on.
It did not care that he had noticed it.
Nathan looked over his shoulder at the black bulk rising behind him, its ridges cutting into the stars, and for one terrible moment the mountain no longer appeared solid. He imagined miles of stone as skin stretched over something larger, older, something that had been covered slowly enough that continents had moved while it waited. Then the thought became ridiculous. Mountains did not have skin. Mountains did not breathe. Whatever lay beneath him was not the mountain.
That should have helped.
It did not.
He turned away and looked down at his hands instead.
They had become someone else's hands sometime after he came out of the cave.
That was the simplest way of thinking about them and therefore the one he had been using, though even that was not really true. They had not belonged to anyone. They were too clean in their construction for that, too deliberate without ever having been designed. The fingers were longer than his own had been. The palms broader. There was a faint pale line near the base of the right thumb that he knew had once belonged to Anton, although Anton had received the scar when he was eleven years old beside a river several thousand miles from where Nathan now sat.
The moment he noticed it, the river returned.
Not as a picture.
As a place.
Grey water under a pale sky. Mud sucking between bare toes. The greasy resistance of a fish twisting in small hands. Anton's father's irritated voice behind him, telling the boy to stop fooling around and hold the bloody thing properly, and then the knife sliding where it ought not to slide. There was pain, bright and stupid. There was the sight of blood pattering onto wet stones. There was embarrassment before there was fear because Anton had been eleven and his father had been watching.
Nathan stared at the scar.
The river vanished.
The African night returned so completely that for several seconds the abruptness of it made him dizzy.
He knew exactly how the wound had healed.
That thought came afterward and was worse.
The blade had cut through skin and into the tissue beneath. It had missed the tendon. Nathan knew the arrangement of collagen that had formed in the scar and knew that the tissue was mechanically inferior to what had existed before, and as soon as he knew that, he knew how it could have been healed without scarring at all. There were half a dozen pathways by which the damaged tissue might have been restored instead of patched. He understood each of them with the effortless certainty of someone remembering how to tie his shoes.
Nathan rubbed his thumb over the scar until the skin grew warm.
He had never studied medicine.
Not really.
He had known enough to clean wounds, bind them, recognise fever and infection, the crude practical knowledge of men who travelled too far from help. He did not know the names for half the things he now understood.
Yet the understanding was there.
He could not get beneath it.
That was the first truly frightening thing.
Knowledge should have a bottom. There should be a moment when a man asks himself how he knows something and arrives at a teacher, a book, a conversation, something seen once and half forgotten. Nathan searched for the bottom and found only more knowledge, layer beneath layer, all of it so old and so complete that the question itself began to feel childish.
He shut his eyes.
His mother was in the kitchen.
The memory came at once because he wanted it to. He had been returning to it ever since he emerged from the mountain, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not, because it was the oldest safe place he possessed. There had been rain on the window. That was what he remembered most clearly. Rain making the glass silver while the room stayed warm around him, and his mother standing at the table with flour on her hands, her sleeves rolled above the elbow, her hair tied back badly enough that one strand had escaped and stuck to her cheek.
He had been very small.
His feet had not reached the floor.
Thunder rolled somewhere outside and he had been afraid of it. Not terribly afraid, not the way a child feared a stranger or the darkness beneath a bed, only enough that he had looked toward his mother each time the sky spoke. She had noticed eventually. She always noticed.
He could no longer remember what she told him.
For years that had bothered him.
Now it seemed almost merciful.
He remembered the feeling instead. The certainty that nothing could happen to him while she stood there. The childish belief that danger was something kept outside by walls and doors and mothers, and that so long as the kitchen remained warm, the world beyond the rain could not reach him.
Nathan stayed there for a while.
He could smell bread.
He could hear the soft scrape of her knife on the board.
He could see the small white scar near the base of her thumb.
His mind entered it.
Not willingly.
The scar ceased being part of his mother and became structure. Beneath the pale line of skin lay a history of damage and repair. Tissue had been opened, vessels cut, clotting begun, inflammatory cells drawn toward the wound, fibres laid down where original architecture could not be perfectly restored. Nathan saw none of this as an image. It was simply known. Worse, it was familiar.
The kitchen changed.
His mother's hand remained, but behind it Nathan saw a thousand other hands.
Ward's hand shaking beside his mother's deathbed.
Hargreaves gripping a railing beneath a stone arch at university while watching the woman he loved walk away.
Mallory's fingers blackened with frost during a winter Nathan had never seen.
Petru holding his newborn daughter and being terrified by how light she felt.
The memories did not arrive one at a time. That would have made them tolerable. They unfolded together, layers of transparent lives laid over one another until Nathan could no longer tell which room he occupied. His mother's kitchen was still there, but Ward's childhood home existed through it. Hargreaves's university courtyard shone wet beneath the same rain. Someone else's father shouted from another room. Someone's dog scratched at a door. Someone was laughing. Someone was dying. Someone was eight years old and afraid to jump into a pond because his older brother was watching.
Nathan opened his eyes.
He was no longer sitting.
He had risen without knowing it and backed nearly ten feet from the rock.
His hands trembled.
He let them.
There was something important about that, though he could not have explained why. His body did not need to tremble. He knew that with the same hateful certainty with which he knew the mechanics of Anton's scar. He could alter the output of hormones responsible for the shaking. He could slow his pulse, narrow his blood vessels, reduce his respiration and erase the physical experience of fear almost completely.
He refused.
The fear was his.
At least he thought it was.
Nathan looked down at his hands again and realised that the thought had become dangerous.
He tried to remember Ward deliberately.
The pond came first.
Ward was eight. The day was warm, though the water was cold enough to hurt when he finally jumped. His brother had laughed at him from the bank, and Ward had hated that laughter more than he feared drowning. Nathan remembered his toes curling in the mud. He remembered the leap. He remembered going under and opening his eyes to a green world filled with drifting particles of light.
Then Ward was seventeen and his mother was dying.
Then twenty-three and drunk.
Then thirty-one and standing over the first man he had shot.
Nathan moved through the memories effortlessly.
That was the wrong word.
He did not move through them at all.
He remembered them.
There was no Ward inside him offering the memories up. No dead man's ghost had survived beneath the surface of Nathan's mind. When Nathan searched for Ward he found no separate presence, no personality waiting in darkness, no soul crying out from somewhere behind his own thoughts.
He found himself remembering being Ward.
The difference was not subtle.
It was unbearable.
Nathan pressed both hands over his face and tried to think of nothing. That proved impossible. Nothingness had never lived.
The phrase occurred to him from nowhere.
He froze.
Nothingness had never lived.
He did not know what it meant.
Then something opened farther back.
There were men around a red pool.
The mountain did not exist yet.
That knowledge came before anything else.
The great ridges behind Nathan were absent, replaced by lower country beneath an enormous evening sky. Fires burned around the water. Their smoke hung low over figures kneeling in the dirt, black men wearing bone, hide, carved wood and ornaments polished smooth by generations of hands. Nathan understood none of the language they spoke. It was so old that whatever tongues descended from it had themselves died before his own civilization learned to write.
A young man screamed.
His wrists were tied.
Four others dragged him toward the water.
Nathan knew they had done this before.
He knew that their fathers had done it before them.
The red pool was sacred.
The red pool healed beasts.
The red pool swallowed the dying.
The red pool sometimes returned things that should have been dead.
They had explanations for this. Gods, ancestors, hunger beneath the earth. Those explanations mattered deeply to the men kneeling around the shore.
They mattered not at all to the thing beneath the water.
The bound man was thrown in.
His body hit the surface.
Nathan expected a splash.
The water opened.
That frightened him in a way the screaming had not.
It did not behave like liquid forced apart by weight. It folded around the man. Accepted him. The red closed over his head and his scream ended, not abruptly, but with the horrible muffling quality of a mouth being covered.
Nathan felt the body enter.
For a moment he thought he had become the sacrificed man.
Then he understood that he was remembering the other side.
The contact was intimate beyond violation. Skin touched the red mass and ceased to be a boundary. Cells were sampled. Blood became chemistry. Bone became architecture. Organs became arrangements that could be retained, compared, broken down and altered. The man who had entered the pool as a person existed beneath the surface as a field of information.
Nathan wanted to turn away.
There was nowhere to turn.
The thing in the pool did not hate him.
It did not know that he was afraid.
It did not know that he had a mother who had once carried him when he was sick, or a woman he intended to marry, or a name shouted by people kneeling on the shore.
All those things survived in the memory now.
That was almost worse.
The organism had remembered everything while caring about none of it.
The man's flesh came apart.
Not crudely. Not like meat beneath a knife.
It was read.
Variations spread through the red mass. Nathan experienced them as possibilities too numerous for human thought, subtle changes in muscle, bone, blood, skin, metabolism, resistance to disease. Most were useless. Some killed the pattern immediately. Some weakened it. Others improved isolated functions while ruining the whole.
The failures were not forgotten.
That was what Nathan slowly came to understand.
Nothing useful was ever truly lost.
The memory rolled backward.
Another sacrifice.
Another generation.
A different tribe.
Then a different people entirely, their language changed, their faces changed, their gods changed, but the red pool remained. Some worshipped it. Some feared it. Some fed enemies to it. Once, during a drought, the exposed water shrank until the people believed their god was dying and killed dozens to save it.
The thing beneath them had not been dying.
Most of it was already underground.
It had followed water into the earth.
Nathan watched centuries become small.
Kingdoms appeared and disappeared so quickly they hardly registered. The people stopped coming. Forest swallowed their settlements. Animals drank where prayers had once been spoken.
An antelope fell into the red water.
Remembered.
A cat followed wounded prey and drowned.
Remembered.
A diseased animal collapsed on the bank and rotted into the pool.
Remembered.
Creatures came that Nathan recognised only from bones in museums, and then creatures for which no museum had a complete skeleton. Mammals changed shape. Great reptiles vanished. Forests became grassland, became forest again, became things for which Nathan had no name.
Still the red remained.
The land began to rise.
Not in a day or a year or a human lifetime. Nathan saw it because the memory did not experience time the way men did. Earth folded. Stone pushed upward. Ancient watercourses vanished beneath new rock. The open red pools were buried so slowly that generations of animals lived and died between movements Nathan perceived as a single continuous gesture.
The mountain grew over it.
Over him.
Nathan made a sound in the darkness.
He did not recognise his own voice.
The memory receded farther.
There were no men.
There were no mammals.
There were no familiar animals.
There were organisms in warm water, simple enough that Nathan wanted to call them primitive until he realised the word meant almost nothing across this distance. They divided. Failed. Changed. Fed upon one another. Entered one another. Borrowed mechanisms. Stole chemistry. Survived by accident and died by accident until enough accidents accumulated to resemble design.
The red organism changed with them.
That was the origin.
Not a god.
Not something that had descended from the stars.
Not a demon sleeping beneath Africa.
Nathan almost wished it had been one of those things.
A god could be alien.
A demon could be evil.
This had grown here.
It belonged.
It was life doing what life did, only without ever surrendering what it learned.
Every living thing that touched it left something behind. Parasites taught attachment and theft. Viruses taught invasion, replication, the hijacking of other cells. Immune systems taught recognition and resistance. Tumours taught growth without restraint. Wounds taught repair. Animals that regenerated limbs taught reconstruction. Predators taught efficiency. Prey taught concealment. Plants taught survival through entirely different economies of energy and matter.
Disease taught as much as health.
Death taught as much as survival.
Nathan began to understand what millions of years actually meant, and that understanding was not intellectual. It was the sudden sickening comprehension that human beings used words such as ancient because their minds had never evolved to feel the true weight of time. A thousand years was history. Ten thousand became myth. A million had no emotional meaning at all.
Yet he remembered it.
Not every second.
That would have been mercifully impossible.
He remembered continuity.
That was worse.
The red sea had never gone to sleep.
It had never been dormant in the sense men understood dormancy. There had always been chemistry occurring somewhere inside it, cells changing, information being compared, successful structures repeated, failures stored away. It had spent ages recombining whatever life gave it, not because it possessed ambition but because that was what survival had become for it.
It did not seek perfection.
Perfection was another human word.
It sought continuation.
And continuation, given enough time, had taught it nearly everything life knew how to do.
Nathan felt something shift in his understanding.
DNA was not yet a word with much meaning in his world, not beyond isolated theories and laboratory speculation. Yet what the word represented lay open to him.
Inheritance.
Instruction.
The quiet machinery by which flesh remembered how to build itself.
He knew it.
The knowledge did not resemble learning. There were no diagrams, no chromosomes sketched upon a page. He simply understood that living organisms were not made once but continually rewritten from information carried forward, copied imperfectly, altered, repaired and expressed according to rules which could themselves be changed.
And he understood the rules.
Nathan's stomach turned.
He thought of his mother's scar again and realised he could remove it.
Not from memory.
From her.
If she were alive and standing before him, he could place his hand over the old wound and instruct the tissue to become what it had been before the knife touched it.
The thought should have been beautiful.
It terrified him.
Because another thought followed.
He could change more than the scar.
The line between healing and redesign existed only because human beings had decided that the body one was born with was somehow the correct answer.
The thing beneath the mountain did not possess that superstition.
Nathan opened his eyes.
He was kneeling in the dirt.
He did not remember falling.
His reflection stared back at him from a shallow patch of water collected between stones. The face there was the one he had made after leaving the cave, drawn unconsciously from the men who had died with him. Hargreaves in the jaw. Ward somewhere around the eyes. Other pieces less easily named.
He touched his cheek.
The skin beneath his fingers felt ordinary.
The face was not.
He had thought, once, that a man's body was the most private thing he possessed. Everything else could be taken. Money, name, reputation, home, freedom. But the body remained the final border between self and world.
Nathan no longer had that border.
He knew how to return to his old face.
He knew how to become Ward.
That knowledge came so easily that his hand dropped away.
Not an approximation of Ward.
Ward.
Height, bone structure, fingerprints, scars, the minute asymmetry of his ears, even imperfections Ward himself had never noticed.
Nathan could wear him.
The idea made him sick.
Then a worse one came.
If the old Nathan could be recreated with equal precision, what made that body more truly his than this one?
Memory?
He had Ward's memories.
Hargreaves's.
The others.
The ancient worshippers.
Animals.
Things that had never possessed language.
So memory could not be the answer.
Continuity?
Nathan had gone into the red sea and something had come out.
He remembered both sides.
That answer was no better.
The thought he had been avoiding since leaving the cave finally became impossible to avoid.
He had been telling himself that the sea had changed him.
That phrasing preserved him.
Nathan existed first. The sea acted upon him. Nathan survived altered.
A subject and an object.
Two things.
He searched inside himself for the other thing.
There was nothing there.
No alien mind.
No ancient hunger pressing against his thoughts.
No second voice.
No monstrous presence waiting patiently behind his own personality.
Nathan felt the mountain again, the buried red mass spread through stone and water, and understood with quiet horror that he had been searching in the wrong direction.
It was not inside him.
He was not outside it.
For millions of years the organism had existed without anything resembling the human idea of a self. It accumulated information, adapted, recombined, persisted. Then Nathan entered it along with men whose memories and bodies became available at the same moment.
Something changed.
Perhaps the sea had learned Nathan too well.
Perhaps Nathan had been the first pattern complex enough to organise the whole around a single point of view.
Perhaps the instant he was dissolved had been the instant the ancient organism acquired the concept of I.
He could not tell.
The inability to tell frightened him more deeply than any answer could have.
Nathan looked toward the mountain and realised there might never again be a meaningful distinction between the thing that had lived beneath it and the man sitting beneath the stars.
He was not possessed.
Possession required two beings.
He was not infected.
Infection required host and invader.
He was not even carrying the sea within himself.
Those were comforting ideas because they allowed separation.
Nathan thought of his mother.
The kitchen returned immediately.
Rain touched the windows.
She stood at the table.
He held onto that memory until it hurt.
It was his, he told himself.
His.
Not because it was older than the others or clearer or more important, but because he chose it.
Nathan began to understand that choice might be the only border he had left.
Ward's childhood belonged to Ward because Nathan decided it did.
Hargreaves's love for Eleanor belonged to Hargreaves.
The terrified young man thrown into the ancient red pool had possessed a name once, whether Nathan remembered it or not, and that life had belonged to him.
Nathan could remember all of them.
He would not become all of them.
The distinction existed nowhere in flesh.
So he would have to keep it alive himself.
That thought gave him a small amount of comfort until he noticed what else was waiting beneath it.
Curiosity.
It had been there through everything.
Quiet.
Almost ashamed.
Nathan had spent his entire life opening doors that sensible men left closed. He had entered tombs, ruins, caves, places marked by every warning human beings knew how to give one another. The unknown had always frightened him less than not knowing.
Now there was almost nothing biological that was truly unknown to him.
Instead there were possibilities.
He looked at his right hand and wondered, only for a fraction of a second, what else it could become.
The fingers changed.
Not dramatically.
That made it worse.
The joints altered by millimetres. The bones lengthened. The skin over the knuckles thickened. His nails darkened into harder structures better suited for tearing than grasping.
Nathan screamed and the hand became human again.
He fell backward.
The change had taken less than a second.
There had been no effort.
He had not ordered it.
He had wondered.
That was enough.
Nathan stared at the hand until the stars began to pale at the edge of the world.
He understood then what the mountain had given him, although given was the wrong word and mountain was the wrong word and perhaps him was becoming the wrong word too.
It was not knowledge alone.
Knowledge could be ignored.
This was familiarity.
Life no longer looked fixed.
Every animal, every person, every living thing had become a temporary arrangement, one answer among countless others. Skin, bone, blood, disease, age, sex, strength, weakness, inheritance; all of it seemed less like identity and more like choices written into matter.
Nathan hated himself for understanding that.
He hated the ancient red sea for teaching it to him.
Then he remembered that there was no sea separate enough to hate.
The first light of dawn touched the distant horizon.
Soon there would be villages below the mountains. Roads. Men with questions. Women carrying children. Sick people. Healthy people. Thousands upon thousands of bodies, each one obeying rules Nathan could now see without trying.
He wondered whether he would be able to tell when someone was ill before they knew it themselves.
He already knew the answer.
He wondered whether he could cure them.
Again the answer was there.
He wondered what else he could change.
Nathan stopped.
The thought did not.
That was when the full horror of what had happened beneath the mountain finally settled upon him, and it was not the horror of becoming a monster. Monsters were simple things. A monster could be recognised, feared, hunted, perhaps killed.
Nathan had become something much more difficult.
He had become a man for whom the natural world was no longer natural.
He sat beneath the fading stars with his mother's kitchen held desperately in one corner of his mind, the warmth of bread and rain and safety preserved there like a candle sheltered between two hands, while behind it stretched a memory older than mankind, older than the mountains, older than anything that had ever possessed a word for fear.
For all that time the red sea had been learning.
Now it could think.
Now it could wonder.
And the thing doing the wondering was Nathan.
....
The first sound was so small that Nathan nearly mistook it for something settling in the brush.
A branch moved somewhere beyond the clearing. Then another. The night resumed its silence for a few seconds, long enough that he began to wonder whether he had imagined it, before a soft rush passed through the undergrowth and something struck the earth hard enough to send a tremor through the roots beneath him.
Nathan lifted his head.
The stars were still clear overhead. The moon had not yet climbed high enough to reach the clearing, and the trees around him remained black from the ground upward, their leaves barely distinguishable from the spaces between them. He had been sitting with his back against a stone, his legs drawn up, trying not to think about the mountain. Trying not to remember Ward at seventeen beside his mother's bed. Trying not to remember bare feet around a red pool under a sky without cities beneath it. Trying, most of all, not to pay attention to the wet pressure that sometimes seemed to move far below him through cracks in the earth.
The sound came again.
Closer.
Nathan stood.
It was running now.
There was no mistaking it. Four feet beating the ground with a quick, uneven rhythm. Brush dragged across fur. Breath came sharply through an open mouth. Once, something gave a short snarl and the hairs rose along Nathan's arms.
His body moved before he decided what to do with it.
One foot slid backward.
Hands came up.
For the first time since leaving the cave, something happened that belonged completely to the man he had been yesterday. There was no strange knowledge in it. No memory of blood chemistry or bone or ancient things in the dark. There was only a man hearing an animal charge him at night and preparing, badly, to keep its teeth out of his throat.
The brush exploded.
A narrow reddish body came through the trees almost flat to the ground and then rose.
Nathan caught one glimpse of white fur beneath the jaw and yellow eyes fixed on him before the animal leapt.
Its mouth was open.
The teeth reached him first.
They closed around his forearm with a pressure that should have hurt much more than it did. The animal struck his chest at the same time and drove him backward, claws raking down his shirt, snapping threads and cutting into the skin beneath. Nathan shouted and swung blindly, his fist catching something hard behind the animal's ear.
The wolf made a high sound.
Its teeth loosened.
Nathan grabbed it.
The whole thing lasted only a few seconds.
Later, he would remember the heat of it more clearly than anything else. The animal was astonishingly warm beneath the fur. Alive in a way that seemed almost violent. Its muscles jumped beneath his hands as it twisted, snarling, trying to find his throat. Nathan caught the lower jaw with one hand, the back of the skull with the other, and pulled.
There should have been a struggle.
There should at least have been effort.
Instead the neck turned.
Nathan stopped.
The animal did not.
Its body twisted beneath his hands, momentum carrying it farther. Something popped once deep inside the neck. Then again. Then a row of small wet cracks followed one another so quickly that they sounded almost delicate.
The muzzle went past the shoulder.
Past the spine.
When Nathan let go, the wolf's head lay backward along its own body.
For a moment it remained standing.
One front paw slid in the dirt.
Then it fell.
Nathan stared down at it.
He had not moved.
The clearing seemed suddenly much larger than it had before.
He could hear insects again.
A faint breeze moved the grass.
The wolf's eyes remained open.
Its body gave a single hard twitch, as though something had kicked it from inside, and then lay still.
Nathan looked at his hands.
There was fur beneath one of his fingernails.
He rubbed his fingers together.
The movement felt stupid.
He did it again.
The wolf had been thin. Not starving, but hungry enough that its ribs showed faintly through the coat. Its rear leg had dragged slightly during the charge. There was an old injury there. The sort of thing that would have healed badly and never quite stopped hurting.
The information arrived without words.
Nathan turned his face away.
His forearm was bleeding.
Four punctures, deep enough that blood should have been running freely. He wiped at them with the edge of his shirt, more grateful than he should have been for the simple ugliness of a bite wound. Something hurt. Something had torn him. He could clean it. Bind it. Worry about infection.
He looked back down.
Two holes had disappeared.
Nathan rubbed at the skin.
The third closed beneath his thumb.
He watched the fourth shrink until nothing remained but a smear of blood over smooth flesh.
His hand stayed there.
A noise came from the ground behind him.
Not a growl.
Something wetter.
Nathan turned slowly.
The wolf's back was moving.
The fur rose along the shoulders as though something underneath had taken a breath.
The skin split.
A red thread appeared between the hairs.
Another followed.
They crawled over the body in branching lines, pushing outward, writhing across the fur. One touched the ground and recoiled. Another curled around the dead animal's foreleg.
Nathan stepped back.
The wolf's ribs folded inward.
There was no explosion of blood. No tearing in the way flesh ought to tear. The body simply began losing its shape. The chest softened. The legs drew shorter. Fur sank into the red mass underneath as though being pulled through water.
Nathan did not say anything.
He could hear his own breathing.
The wolf's head moved last.
Its reversed neck seemed to liquefy first. Bone showed pale beneath the collapsing flesh and then softened too, drawn into red cords that lifted from the ground.
Those cords turned toward him.
Nathan backed into the stone.
His heel slipped.
The first strand struck his palm.
It disappeared.
Not through the skin.
Into it.
Nathan jerked his hand away, but the rest were already moving.
They reached his arms, his chest, his throat. The dead wolf came apart faster, its body narrowing into ropes of red tissue that stretched across the clearing and vanished against Nathan's clothes.
He clawed at his shirt.
There was nothing there.
No wound.
No thing he could pull free.
The final piece of the wolf, a thin strip of red flesh carrying a few dark hairs, slid into the center of his hand.
Then there was only the blood on the ground.
Nathan remained pressed against the stone.
Nothing moved.
He looked at the empty place where the animal had been.
For several seconds he waited for it to come back.
His stomach tightened.
Nathan bent over and vomited into the grass.
The first spasm brought up little. The second hurt more. By the third he was dry-heaving, one hand against the ground, saliva hanging from his mouth.
His wrist bent strangely.
He looked at it.
The bones beneath the skin had shortened.
Nathan snatched his hand toward his chest.
The fingers were already drawing inward.
The joints thickened and shifted. Nails darkened. Hair pushed through the backs of his hands in a fine red-brown layer.
He made a noise that might have been a word.
His legs folded beneath him.
There was no pain.
That was worse.
His knees moved higher. His hips narrowed. His spine seemed to loosen all at once and then settle into another arrangement. The world tipped forward as his arms lengthened relative to his body and his weight came down onto hands that were no longer hands.
Nathan tried to stand.
His balance vanished.
His face pushed outward.
Teeth pressed through gums that had already begun making room for them. His jaw lengthened with a smooth pressure that made his eyes water. His ears rang once, sharply.
Then the smells came.
The night flooded him.
The ground beneath his nose was alive with things he had never noticed before. Beetles under stone. Damp roots. Droppings hidden beneath grass. Old rain trapped in bark. The grease from his own fingers on the front of his shirt. The sourness of vomit. Blood.
He lifted his head.
The blood was not one smell.
There were two.
His.
The wolf's.
He could tell exactly where one stopped and the other began.
Nathan looked down.
A paw stood in the dirt.
For a moment he stared at it without recognising it.
The paw moved.
He looked farther back.
Red fur covered a narrow foreleg.
Beyond that lay his shirt, crumpled on the earth.
His trousers had collapsed beneath it.
Nathan stared at the clothes for a long time.
They looked wrong without anyone inside them.
There was something indecent about it. A shape meant for a human body lying empty in the dirt, sleeves folded under themselves, the collar open toward the sky.
Nathan stepped closer.
The movement came easily.
He stopped.
There had been no thought behind the step. No fumbling with four legs. No confusion about which limb should move first.
He took another.
The same.
His back shifted naturally beneath the fur.
His head lowered without feeling strange.
Nathan looked down at himself again.
He tried to speak.
The sound that came from his mouth was short and rough.
He froze.
His tongue felt too long.
He tried once more.
A whine this time.
The noise sickened him.
Something snapped at the far side of the clearing.
Nathan's head turned so quickly that his neck hurt.
There were men between the trees.
Five of them.
He had not heard them approach.
That frightened him more than the wolf had.
They stood close together at the edge of the clearing, their bodies dark against the foliage. Spears. A bow. Woven cloth. Hide. Bare legs dusted pale around the ankles.
One of them had both hands over his mouth.
Another was staring at the empty clothing.
Nathan followed his gaze.
Then back to himself.
The men began shouting.
The language came hard and fast, words falling over one another. Nathan recognised nothing. One of the men pointed at him, then at the blood on the ground, then made a sharp gesture toward the discarded clothes.
Another man struck the pointing hand down.
They argued without taking their eyes from Nathan.
One of them began to pray.
Nathan could hear it in the voice.
He did not need the words.
The man's lips trembled. His fingers made some small repeated motion against his chest. Another raised his spear but the weapon shook so badly that the point wandered between Nathan and the ground.
Nathan took one step toward them.
The prayer broke into a shout.
He stopped.
The men backed away together.
Nathan opened his mouth.
He wanted to tell them that he did not know what had happened.
That he had not meant to kill the animal.
That he did not know why its body had gone into his or why he was looking at them from several feet closer to the ground.
A bark came out.
The sound cracked across the clearing.
One of the men screamed.
Then they ran.
Not with the discipline of people retreating from danger. They broke apart at once, crashing into the trees, shoving branches aside, abandoning caution altogether. One dropped his spear and did not return for it. Another stumbled hard enough that Nathan heard skin strike stone, then scrambled upright and kept going.
Their voices faded downhill.
Nathan stood where they had left him.
He could still hear them.
Long after the trees swallowed them.
Their hearts beat violently in the dark.
Five rhythms.
One faster than the others.
One stuttering oddly after the fall.
They spread farther apart as they ran.
Nathan listened until the sound became unbearable.
He lowered his head.
His nose almost touched the earth.
The smell of the wolf remained around him.
And then, quietly, without warning, a piece of its life surfaced.
Grass against the belly.
Cold air.
A rodent beneath the soil.
The ache in the rear leg after running too far.
Nathan's scent in the clearing.
He stopped moving.
The memory did not look like his memories of Ward or Hargreaves.
There were no words in it.
No names.
Only smell and movement and a quick burst of fear.
Something wrong in the clearing.
Something wearing the smell of a man badly.
Nathan backed away from his own clothes.
The memory came again.
The wolf had been circling farther downhill when the scent reached it.
Man.
Blood.
Stone.
And beneath all of it, something it had never smelled before.
The animal had stopped.
Its ears had gone flat.
Then hunger had won.
Nathan sat down hard.
The posture came naturally.
He hated that too.
He looked at the front paws resting between his legs.
For a little while he thought about his mother's kitchen.
Not intentionally.
It simply came.
Rain on the window.
Flour on the table.
Her sleeves rolled up.
Nathan small enough that his feet did not touch the floor.
His hands had been dirty.
There was mud under one fingernail.
She had noticed.
She had told him to wash before dinner.
He remembered being annoyed.
The memory was so ordinary that something inside him tightened.
He looked down at the paw.
The kitchen remained.
Nothing about it had faded.
The hand in the memory and the paw in the dirt existed together without contradiction.
Nathan closed his eyes.
Ward's pond arrived.
Hargreaves beneath the university arch.
A red pool beneath a sky he had never seen.
Then the wolf again, running through grass.
Nathan opened his eyes.
The abandoned spear lay near the trees.
His clothes beside him.
Blood drying in the dust.
For a while there was nothing in the clearing except a wolf sitting beside the clothing of a man.
Far downhill the tribesmen began shouting again.
Other voices answered them.
More people now.
Nathan listened.
He could imagine the story growing as it travelled.
A white man in the mountains.
A wolf.
Blood.
The animal swallowed by the man.
The man swallowed by the animal.
Maybe by morning the story would already be something else.
It would not matter.
He had memories of people kneeling around red water thousands of years before any of those men had been born. They had made stories too.
They had watched things go into the pool and sometimes watched something else come out.
Nathan looked toward the black mountain.
The memories there felt very far away.
And much too close.
He tried to picture his own face.
The original one came first.
Then the new one.
Dark hair. Brown eyes. Hargreaves's jaw, perhaps. Ward around the brow. Others mixed through it so thoroughly that no man could have pointed to himself.
Nathan thought of becoming human again.
His body did nothing.
He tried harder.
Still nothing.
A coldness moved through him.
Human.
He wanted to be human.
But the word had become too broad.
His old face?
The new one?
Ward?
Hargreaves?
The wolf shifted its weight beneath him.
Nathan stared into the grass.
For the first time that night he missed something he had never known he possessed.
A fixed answer.
Yesterday, when someone called his name, a single body had turned toward the voice.
Now there were too many.
The thought did not arrive with any revelation.
It simply sat there while the night moved around him.
Nathan lowered himself slowly onto the dirt, resting his head between his forelegs.
He could smell the wolf's blood.
He could remember being the wolf.
He could remember killing it.
Both memories belonged somewhere inside the same silence.
The stars remained overhead.
The mountain remained behind him.
Far below, men were still shouting about what they had seen.
Nathan lay beside his empty clothes until dawn began whitening the edge of the world, afraid to choose another shape because some small, exhausted part of him had begun to wonder whether choosing was all that separated a body from a costume.
..
Daro did not tell his wife what he had seen on the mountain until she found him sitting outside their hut with the spear across his knees and asked him why he had been awake since sunset.
He had come home shortly before dawn with Kalla and the others, all five men bleeding from their hands and faces where thorn branches had caught them during the run. Nobody had spoken much when they entered the village. Men who had been awake tending the fires asked what had happened, and Kalla told them there had been a wolf. That was true enough that nobody challenged him immediately. Wolves lived in the high country. Men frightened by a wolf could run. Men frightened badly enough might lose a spear, as Bekele had.
But Daro's wife knew him too well.
Mena sat beside him after their children had fallen asleep. She did not ask again. She waited.
The fire had burned low. Orange light moved across the packed earth between the houses, occasionally catching one of the dogs curled close to the warmth. Beyond the last hut there was perhaps twenty paces of open ground before the scrub began.
Daro had been watching those trees for hours.
Eventually Mena followed his gaze.
"What was in the mountain?"
Daro rubbed both hands over his face.
He could still see it.
The stranger had been standing over the dead wolf. Young. Tall. Clothes unlike anything worn in the valley, filthy from travel and torn along one arm. Daro remembered wondering where a foreign man could possibly have come from so high in the mountains. There had been no horse. No pack. No companions.
Then the wolf had opened.
Daro's stomach tightened.
He had seen animals butchered since childhood. He knew what flesh looked like beneath hide. He knew the colour of organs pulled warm from a goat. What happened to the wolf had looked nothing like death.
It had gone into the man.
After that the man had gone down onto all fours.
Daro had run before the change finished.
"There was a man," he said.
Mena waited.
"A stranger."
"What kind?"
"I don't know."
That answer irritated her. "You saw him."
"Yes."
"Then what kind?"
Daro looked at her.
He tried to find words that would not sound foolish.
"He was one kind when I saw him. Then he was another."
Mena's expression changed very slightly.
The village had old stories. Every village did. Most were told to children because children behaved better when darkness contained consequences. Don't go to the river after sunset. Don't follow a voice calling from beyond the fields. Don't answer someone who speaks your name when you know everyone you love is already sleeping.
Adults laughed at such things while the sun was up.
They laughed less after midnight.
Mena turned toward the trees again.
"What happened to Bekele's spear?"
"He dropped it."
"Bekele doesn't drop his spear."
"No."
A dog near the fire lifted its head.
Daro stopped talking.
The animal stared toward the northern scrub.
Its ears went forward.
Mena placed a hand on Daro's arm.
For several moments there was nothing.
Then something moved beneath the trees.
Not close. Perhaps fifty paces away, where the darkness was too thick for the fire to reach.
A branch shifted.
The dog stood.
Daro tightened his grip on the spear.
A red shape passed between two trunks.
Only for an instant.
Low to the ground.
Gone before Daro could point.
The dog whimpered and crawled beneath a sleeping platform.
Mena went inside without being told.
Daro stayed outside until the sun came up.
---
Three days later, Tulu came running back from the northern pasture without his goats.
He was fourteen and normally so proud of being trusted with the animals that he treated every question about them as an insult. That afternoon he came through the village at a dead sprint, empty-handed, shouting for his father.
Half the village followed him back.
Daro went because Mena gave him a look that said she would rather he did not, and because remaining behind would have been worse.
They found the goats pressed together beneath a stand of thorn trees.
There were twenty-three animals in the flock. Every one of them faced north.
Not feeding.
Not wandering.
Watching.
Tulu's father swore and shoved his way among them. "What frightened them?"
The boy pointed.
"There."
Nothing stood between the trees.
Tulu swallowed. "I saw it."
Daro felt the back of his neck tighten.
"What?"
"The red wolf."
Several men looked at him.
Tulu's father cuffed the boy lightly behind the ear. "A wolf doesn't leave twenty-three goats alive."
"It didn't want them."
Somebody laughed.
It was the wrong kind of laugh.
Tulu's face reddened. "It was looking at me."
"From where?"
The boy pointed again.
Daro walked toward the place before anybody else could.
He did not want to.
That irritated him enough to keep moving.
The soil near the trees was soft from rain earlier in the week. Tracks showed clearly where something had passed through.
Wolf prints.
Daro crouched.
They were larger than he remembered the animal being.
He followed them around the outer edge of the flock. One print, another, another. The animal had walked slowly. It had circled the goats.
Then the tracks changed.
Daro stopped.
Behind him, Tulu's father said, "What?"
Daro did not answer.
The next mark in the mud was a foot.
A human foot.
Bare.
The heel was deep. Five toes at the front.
Another lay ahead of it.
Then another.
Kalla came beside him and said nothing.
Together they followed the footprints.
Eleven steps.
At the twelfth, the mark in the dirt was a paw again.
Nobody laughed after that.
They took the goats home before sunset.
---
That night Daro woke because somebody was standing outside his house.
He knew this before opening his eyes.
There was a particular quality to silence when another person occupied it.
Mena slept beside him. Their youngest daughter lay curled against her mother's back.
Daro listened.
Nothing.
Then somebody whispered his name.
"Daro."
His eyes opened.
The voice had come from outside the rear wall.
He reached slowly for the knife near his sleeping mat.
Mena stirred.
Daro put one hand against her shoulder.
She went still.
The voice came again.
"Daro."
Mena's fingers closed around his wrist.
It sounded like Kalla.
Exactly like Kalla.
Daro could hear the roughness in his throat from an illness he had suffered two rainy seasons before. He could hear the slight way he swallowed the last syllable.
But Kalla's house stood on the other side of the village.
Daro leaned close to Mena's ear.
"Stay here."
Her nails dug into his skin.
"No."
Outside, Kalla's voice said something else.
The words were foreign.
Soft.
Almost conversational.
A long sentence spoken by a man who seemed to expect an answer.
Daro's mouth had gone dry.
The voice stopped.
Something brushed the outside wall.
Scratch.
Scratch.
Scratch.
Not claws.
Fingernails.
Daro stood.
Mena grabbed the back of his clothing.
He stepped toward the doorway anyway.
The fire outside had gone nearly dark. Only a few coals remained.
Daro pushed the hide covering aside.
Cold air touched his face.
Nothing stood outside.
He waited.
A shape moved near the northern trees.
Wolf.
Red fur catching faint starlight.
It stood watching him.
Daro stared.
The wolf turned away.
Then it said, in Kalla's voice:
"Daro."
The animal disappeared between the trees.
Daro remained in the doorway until Mena pulled him inside.
Neither slept again.
At dawn they went to Kalla's house.
He had been asleep all night.
---
By the end of the first week, the children had learned not to go near the northern trees.
Nobody had told them exactly why.
Children never needed to be told everything.
They heard the adults stop talking when they entered. They saw men begin carrying spears to relieve themselves after dark. They noticed that the dogs slept closer to the houses.
One evening Daro found his eldest son, Biru, crouched with three other boys behind a grain store.
They were whispering.
Daro stepped close enough to hear.
"Call it," one boy said.
Biru shook his head.
"You're afraid."
"You call it."
The other boy looked toward the trees and cupped his hands around his mouth.
"Wolf-Man!"
Daro struck him so hard across the back of the head that the child fell forward.
Every boy froze.
Daro had never hit another man's son before.
He barely noticed.
"Inside."
The boys scattered.
Biru remained.
His eyes had filled with tears.
Daro grabbed his shoulder.
"You never call into the trees after dark."
"I didn't."
"Never."
Biru stared at him.
"Is it really a man?"
Daro's grip loosened.
He looked toward the northern scrub.
"I don't know."
"What is it?"
Daro wanted an answer badly enough to become angry at his son for asking.
"Inside."
Biru went.
Daro stayed.
That night, after the fires had burned down, a child's voice called from the forest.
It cried for its mother.
The village woke almost at once.
A woman ran from her hut before her husband caught her around the waist.
"My baby!"
Their children were inside behind her.
All of them.
The crying came again.
Farther into the trees.
"Mama!"
The woman screamed back.
Daro and three men dragged her away from the forest while her husband shouted the names of their children over and over, proving to her that none were missing.
The thing in the trees kept crying.
It did not sound like any child in the village.
That somehow made it worse.
It cried for almost an hour.
Then stopped.
In the morning they found wolf tracks beyond the fire pits.
Nothing else.
---
A caravan arrived from the north during the second week.
Five mules, three traders and two men carrying rifles.
Daro recognised the rifles immediately. More had begun appearing during the past years. Menelik's reach was spreading through places which had once known emperors only by distant names, and every few months another traveller brought stories of chiefs bending the knee, roads opening, soldiers moving south.
The older men spent the afternoon speaking with the travellers.
Daro listened from nearby.
"More troops are coming," one trader said. "Not tomorrow. Not next week. But they are coming."
Bekele spat into the dust.
"They always say that."
"They said it about the lands north of here too."
Bekele did not answer.
One of the riflemen looked toward the mountains. "Road through there?"
"No."
"Hunting?"
Daro said, "No."
The man glanced at him.
"There is always hunting."
"Not there."
The rifleman smiled.
It was the smile of someone hearing superstition.
Daro hated him immediately.
That evening the stranger went to piss beyond the last huts.
He came back without fastening his trousers.
His face had gone grey.
"What?"
The man pointed behind him.
Everyone looked.
There was nothing near the trees.
"What did you see?"
The rifleman opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Then said, "A man."
Daro's chest tightened.
"Where?"
"In the trees."
"What man?"
"I don't know."
The stranger rubbed his mouth.
"He was standing there naked."
Several villagers crossed themselves or made older signs against evil.
The rifleman became angry at their reaction.
"There was a man. That's all."
Daro asked, "What did he look like?"
The stranger stared at him.
"Young."
"Face?"
"I couldn't see."
"Hair?"
"Dark."
The rifleman's irritation was slipping.
"He was too tall."
Nobody spoke.
"How tall?" Daro asked.
The man looked toward the trees again.
"Taller than me."
He was already the tallest man in the caravan.
The traders left at first light.
They had planned to stay another day.
---
Two nights later, Daro saw the man himself.
He had gone to check a sick goat in the western enclosure. The animal had stopped eating and lay apart from the others, sides moving rapidly.
Daro crouched beside it.
The goat's eyes kept shifting toward the tree line.
"I know," Daro whispered.
He was ashamed the instant he said it.
As though they shared something.
He placed a hand along the goat's neck.
The animal shivered.
A branch moved.
Daro looked up.
Someone stood beyond the enclosure.
The moon showed him in pieces.
Bare feet.
Long legs.
A narrow waist.
Shoulders that belonged to a stronger man than the rest of the body suggested.
Dark hair.
The stranger stood perhaps forty paces away.
Daro could not see his face clearly.
"Who are you?"
The man did not move.
Daro picked up his spear.
"Speak."
For a little while they watched one another.
Then the stranger said something.
The language was incomprehensible.
Daro heard uncertainty in it.
Not menace.
That disturbed him more.
The man tried again.
A different language.
Then another.
Each voice changed slightly.
One older.
One rougher.
One carrying sounds Daro had never heard a human mouth make.
"Stop."
The stranger fell silent.
Daro raised the spear.
"What do you want?"
The young man's head tilted.
The movement was wrong.
Too sudden.
His eyes moved toward the goat.
Daro stepped between them.
"No."
The stranger looked back at him.
Something shifted beneath his skin.
Daro saw it.
A movement along the shoulders.
The bones rose.
His body lengthened.
Daro backed away.
The man's arms dropped lower as his spine stretched upward. His shoulders widened. For one impossible moment the moonlight held a shape taller than the enclosure posts, its head almost brushing the low branches.
Daro's spear fell from his hands.
The shape folded.
Not downward.
Inward.
Red fur crossed the body.
Four legs struck the earth.
The wolf stood there.
Daro could not move.
The animal looked at the sick goat again.
Then at him.
It made a low sound.
Not a growl.
Something almost like frustration.
Then it vanished into the trees.
Daro stayed beside the goat until sunrise.
When Mena came looking for him she found him sitting in the dirt with the spear across his lap and the sick animal asleep beside him.
"What happened?"
Daro looked toward the forest.
"He could have taken it."
Mena frowned.
"The goat?"
"Yes."
"But he didn't."
"No."
That bothered him all day.
---
The stories about the wolf changed after that.
Fear remained, but certainty began to rot around its edges.
It never took livestock.
It never attacked children.
It never entered the houses.
People heard it. Saw it. Found its tracks.
But nothing disappeared.
One old woman left meat near the trees.
Her daughter discovered it and threw it away.
The following morning another piece had appeared in the same place.
Nobody knew who put it there.
The next night the meat was gone.
After that small offerings began appearing.
Milk.
Grain.
A strip of dried goat.
Bekele kicked over a bowl one afternoon.
"You fools want it to believe we worship it?"
Nobody answered.
Bekele pointed toward the mountain.
"That is how stories begin. First you feed the thing in the trees. Then your sons feed it. Their sons forget why. A hundred years later people kneel."
Daro looked sharply at him.
Bekele noticed.
"What?"
"Nothing."
But Daro remembered the first night.
The wolf opening.
The stranger changing.
And something about Bekele's words left a taste in his mouth.
That night something walked around Bekele's house.
Everyone heard it.
Four feet.
Then two.
Then four.
It circled for hours.
Bekele never came outside.
Near dawn a man's voice spoke from behind his hut.
It sounded exactly like Bekele.
People heard it say a sentence in some foreign language.
Then it laughed.
Bekele did not leave his home until afternoon.
Nobody mentioned it to him.
---
The soldiers arrived during the final week.
Not a caravan this time.
Eight mounted men came south along the path carrying rifles and the authority of an empire which was becoming more real with every passing season.
The village gathered unwillingly.
Their leader was a hard-faced man with a trimmed beard who spoke as though every sentence had already been decided somewhere else.
Menelik's name came several times.
So did tribute.
The elders answered carefully.
Daro stood behind Bekele with the other hunters.
The horses became uneasy almost immediately.
One stamped.
Another tossed its head.
Their leader pulled harshly on the reins.
"Quiet."
The horse screamed.
Every conversation stopped.
The animal reared.
The rider swore and barely remained seated.
Then the other horses began.
They pulled backward, eyes rolling white. One kicked another. A third tried to turn and nearly crushed a soldier between two mounts.
The villagers scattered.
Daro did not.
He was looking north.
The red wolf stood beneath the trees.
Still.
Watching.
One of the soldiers saw it.
"There!"
He raised his rifle.
Daro shouted, "Don't!"
The shot came first.
The wolf moved.
Daro lost it.
One instant it stood beneath the tree.
The next the bullet tore bark from the trunk behind it.
The soldiers shouted.
Another rifle came up.
Something crossed behind the houses.
A blur.
A woman screamed.
Daro spun.
There—a man now, running between two huts.
Barely human long enough to recognise.
Dark hair.
Then too tall.
Then nothing.
A rifle fired.
The horses broke.
One tore free and charged through the center of the village. People threw themselves aside.
The soldiers began shouting at one another.
The forest answered.
A wolf yowled.
The sound climbed through the night air.
Halfway through, it changed.
The animal's cry caught, deepened, and became a man's voice.
Not words at first.
Just the same long sound dragged through a human throat.
Every person in the village stopped.
The final note echoed from the mountains.
The soldier nearest Daro lowered his rifle.
"What in God's name—"
Something spoke behind him.
"Don't."
The soldier turned.
Nothing there.
The word had been strange, foreign to Daro.
But the soldier understood it.
His face proved that.
He swung the rifle toward the trees.
"Who's there?"
A man's voice answered from the darkness.
Daro did not know the language.
The soldier did.
His hands began to tremble.
"What did it say?" Daro asked.
The man did not answer.
"What did it say?"
The soldier stared into the trees.
"It said not to shoot again."
Nobody fired after that.
The imperial men left before sunrise.
Their leader said they had orders farther south.
Nobody bothered pretending to believe him.
---
The month ended beneath a full moon.
Daro woke sometime after midnight and found the place beside him empty.
He sat up.
"Mena?"
No answer.
His stomach dropped.
He ran outside.
She stood beyond the fire pit.
Barefoot.
Looking toward the trees.
Daro hurried to her.
"What are you doing?"
She lifted one hand.
"Listen."
At first he heard nothing.
Then a voice drifted through the leaves.
A man speaking softly.
Another answered.
Daro frowned.
There were two.
No.
Three.
The first voice was young.
The second belonged to an older man.
The third sounded exhausted, almost laughing.
They spoke back and forth from different places in the forest.
Daro's skin prickled.
"There are men out there."
Mena shook her head.
"No."
One voice moved.
It had been fifty paces east.
Now it came from west of them.
Another began speaking while the first was still talking.
Then a woman's voice joined.
Daro took Mena's hand.
The forest filled slowly with conversation.
Foreign words.
Different ages.
Different accents.
A dozen people talking quietly where no people stood.
The dogs crawled beneath the houses.
Lights appeared in doorways as the rest of the village woke.
Nobody went closer.
Then every voice stopped.
Silence settled.
The red wolf stepped out from beneath the trees.
It walked into the moonlight.
No hurry.
No threat.
It stopped where the offerings had sometimes been left.
Daro could see its narrow face clearly.
For several seconds it watched the village.
Then its body began to rise.
Mena squeezed Daro's hand.
The change happened softly.
The forelegs lengthened and lifted from the earth. The spine straightened. Red fur sank into skin. The skull shortened until the wolf's narrow muzzle became the face of a young man.
He stood naked beneath the moon.
Dark hair fell around his forehead.
He was taller than Daro remembered.
The face was not the same as the one in the mountain.
Daro knew that although he could not have explained how.
Pieces were wrong.
Or perhaps new.
The young man looked at the people gathered around their fires.
Nobody spoke.
Then he looked at Daro.
For the first time, Daro saw his eyes clearly.
There was nothing monstrous in them.
That was the worst of it.
They looked frightened.
The stranger opened his mouth.
A sentence came out in one of the foreign tongues.
He stopped.
Tried another.
Then another.
Frustration crossed his face.
The village remained silent.
Finally the young man touched his own chest.
"Nathan."
The word meant nothing.
Daro stared.
The stranger repeated it.
"Nathan."
Perhaps a name.
Daro hesitated.
Then touched his own chest.
"Daro."
The young man's eyes changed.
Not colour.
Expression.
Some small tension left them.
"Daro," he repeated.
Perfectly.
Too perfectly.
Daro's blood went cold.
The voice was his own.
Mena gasped.
Nathan seemed to hear what he had done.
His face changed immediately.
Regret.
He stepped backward.
Daro found himself raising one hand.
He did not know whether he meant stop or go.
Nathan watched him.
Then the human shape collapsed into red fur.
The wolf landed silently on four feet.
It turned toward the forest.
At the edge of the trees it looked back once.
Then it disappeared.
Nobody moved for a long time.
Mena was the first to speak.
"He has a name."
Daro continued staring into the darkness.
Somewhere high among the trees a wolf began to run, its paws passing through leaves so quickly that soon the sound became indistinguishable from wind.
"Yes," Daro said.
He did not know why that frightened him more than anything else they had learned.
Until then, the thing in the mountains could still have been a spirit.
A curse.
An animal wearing men.
Those were old fears. People had names for them.
But the thing in the forest had looked at him with the face of a frightened young man and tried to introduce itself.
Daro listened to the sound fade into the mountains.
Behind him, the village fires burned low.
"He has a name," Mena whispered again.
Far away, hidden somewhere beyond the leaves, Daro's own voice answered in the darkness.
"Daro."
This time Nathan said it gently.
...
The men from Menelik's army arrived while the morning was still cool, riding into the village beneath a sky so clear that the rifles across their saddles flashed whenever the sun caught them. There were fourteen this time, more than had come before, and they brought with them none of the uneasiness of the previous patrol. These men had heard the stories farther north, had apparently laughed at them there, and by the time they dismounted they had already reduced everything that had happened in the valley to frightened villagers, nervous soldiers and an unusually large wolf. Their officer was a thick-necked man with a short beard and a dark jacket buttoned neatly despite the heat beginning to rise from the earth. He listened to Bekele for perhaps a minute before impatience showed around his mouth.
"You say it lives in those trees?"
Bekele looked toward the mountain.
"We say something is there."
The officer glanced at the other men beneath the meeting tree. "A wolf?"
Nobody answered.
"A man?"
Daro shifted his weight.
The officer noticed. "You saw him?"
Daro nodded.
"What did he look like?"
Daro thought of the young face beneath the moon, then of red fur disappearing between the trees, then of a shape standing too high beneath branches that should have hung above any man's head.
"Different."
One of the soldiers laughed.
The officer did not. "Different how?"
Daro looked at him. "Every time."
That ended the questions for a moment.
The officer turned toward the forest again, studying it as though a long enough stare might produce whatever answer these people had failed to give him. Sunlight lay across the first rows of trees, making them seem thin and harmless. Birds moved through the upper branches. Somewhere beyond those trunks the land climbed sharply toward the mountain and the paths narrowed until only hunters, herders and fools had much reason to use them.
The officer pointed toward Daro. "You will guide us."
"No."
The answer came softly.
The soldier nearest the officer looked over.
The officer himself seemed uncertain that he had heard correctly. "What?"
Daro repeated it.
"No."
There was a quiet movement behind him as Kalla came closer. Bekele stayed where he was, one hand resting over the top of his spear.
The officer looked from one to another.
"You know these mountains."
"Yes."
"Then you will show us where this thing has been seen."
Daro shook his head.
"You can follow the northern trail until it splits beside the black rocks. After that you can choose whichever way you like."
"You are coming."
"No."
The officer watched him for several breaths, then smiled faintly.
Daro had seen that kind of smile before. It belonged to men who believed refusal was temporary.
He turned toward the rest of the village. "Who else knows the trails?"
Nobody moved.
Men stood beside their huts or beneath the shade. Women watched from doorways. Even Tulu, who had once thrown stones into the trees to prove he was not frightened of anything living there, kept his eyes on the ground.
The officer's smile disappeared.
Bekele said, "You have rifles."
Several soldiers laughed at that.
The old man looked at them.
"Use them."
The laughter died on its own.
The officer gave a short order.
His men began preparing.
Daro stood with Mena near the edge of the village and watched them check ammunition, fill their water skins and tighten the straps of their packs. The youngest among them joked while he worked. He was perhaps eighteen, thin through the shoulders, with a narrow pleasant face and a little scar beside one eyebrow. He talked more than the others and laughed easily. When he noticed two girls watching from beside the grain huts, he stood straighter and said something to the man next to him that made both of them grin.
Mena looked at Daro.
"Why are you watching him?"
Daro did not know.
"He's young."
"So are many soldiers."
The young man slung his rifle over one shoulder and joined the column.
Daro remembered that movement too.
The soldiers entered the trees shortly after midday.
The officer went first. The others followed one after another until the youngest remained alone for a moment at the boundary between sunlight and shade. He looked back toward the village, noticed one of the girls again and gave her a quick smile before stepping beneath the branches.
Then they were gone.
For hours there was nothing to hear.
The village tried to continue without them. Women went to the river. Goats were moved between enclosures. Grain was ground beneath stones. A child cried because another child had taken something from him, then forgot why he was crying and began chasing a dog around the houses. Daro replaced a broken section of fencing beside the western pen and found, after nearly half an hour, that he had tied the same length of cord around the post three times.
Mena eventually took the cord from him.
"You'll have the whole fence tied to that one post."
Daro sat back on his heels.
The mountain rose beyond her shoulder.
The sun had moved west.
"They should have come back by now," she said.
"Maybe."
"You don't think so."
Daro wiped his palms against his trousers.
"They weren't looking for a road."
Mena sat beside him.
Neither spoke again.
By late afternoon nobody was working very hard. People had begun collecting near the northern side of the village without calling it a gathering. They simply happened to carry their work closer to the same place. Men repaired tools where they could see the trees. Women sat together cleaning grain. Children were kept nearer than usual.
The mountain darkened first.
Light still lay across the village when the gullies beneath the high ridges became black.
Daro was standing beside Kalla when the yowl came down from somewhere above them.
It began faintly, so far away that for several seconds it might have been wind threading itself through the rock. Then it rose, thin and clear, passing over the treetops and out across the valley.
Every dog stopped what it was doing.
One had been gnawing a bone near the houses. It raised its head and simply left the bone where it lay.
The sound held for a long time.
Near the end something changed in it. The note dropped lower than a wolf's throat should have carried and seemed almost to catch upon itself before fading into the mountain.
Kalla looked at Daro.
Neither spoke.
A gunshot cracked from the trees.
Several children cried out.
Another shot came immediately after it.
Then another.
The people around Daro rose.
The rifles began firing in clusters. Two or three shots together, silence, then a sudden burst from farther up the slope. The mountain threw the sounds back until the echoes crossed one another and nobody could tell whether ten men were shooting or fifty.
Men began shouting beneath the gunfire.
The words were too distant to make out.
There was another volley.
A pause.
Someone screamed.
The scream lasted only a second before a rifle fired over it.
Daro felt Mena come beside him.
The light continued draining from the valley.
Birds burst suddenly from the forest, hundreds of them lifting through the canopy as though the trees had thrown them upward. They turned together over the village and disappeared south.
Another scream carried down.
This one did not stop immediately.
Somebody was shouting a name.
The same name again.
Again.
The voice vanished behind several shots.
Then came the crashing of something large through undergrowth, followed by men yelling to one another from different parts of the slope.
Daro could hear them moving downhill.
The shooting moved with them.
A rifle cracked much closer than before.
A second answered from somewhere east.
Then nothing for perhaps ten heartbeats.
One shot.
Another long silence.
The village had become so quiet that Daro could hear one of the goats breathing behind him.
A man began screaming in the trees.
Not words at first.
Then words came.
"Help!"
The language was not Daro's, but the meaning required none.
"Help me!"
Several people shifted forward.
Daro did not.
The scream came closer.
Branches snapped.
Someone was running.
A shape burst through the trees and almost fell when it struck the open ground.
It was the young soldier.
His rifle was gone. Half his coat had been torn away and blood covered the right side of his face. One trouser leg was split from the knee down. He ran with a limp for several steps, nearly collapsed, then saw the village and forced himself faster.
"Help!"
His voice broke on the word.
Daro recognised the face immediately.
The little scar beside the eyebrow.
The narrow jaw.
The same young man who had looked back at the girl before walking into the forest.
He ran with both hands out in front of him as though the village itself might reach back.
People began moving toward him.
Mena caught Daro's wrist.
The soldier looked over his shoulder.
His face changed.
Daro followed his gaze.
There was nothing between the trees.
For half a second.
Then something red shot from the darkness.
It crossed the grass almost too quickly to see. Long, wet, narrower at the end, it struck the young soldier around the waist and coiled once.
His body stopped so suddenly that his feet went out from under him.
He hit the dirt hard.
The scream that left him sounded nothing like the one before.
He dug both hands into the ground.
The red cord tightened.
His body slid backward.
"No!"
His fingers carved through the dry earth.
Daro saw a nail tear loose.
The soldier reached toward them.
"Please!"
Kalla had one arm across Daro's chest now.
Daro had not realised he was moving.
The young man's face twisted as he was pulled another yard toward the trees.
"Please! Please!"
The thing around his waist jerked.
His chin struck the ground.
For an instant he disappeared behind a low rise in the earth, then came back into view farther away, both hands still clawing.
He screamed once more.
The trees took him.
Branches shook violently.
There was a wet sound somewhere within them.
Then nothing.
Nobody went after him.
The marks left by his hands remained in the dirt.
One finger had drawn a line almost three feet long before the nail came away. It lay there by itself, pale against the dark soil.
Mena's grip on Daro's wrist hurt.
He did not ask her to loosen it.
The forest stayed still.
A minute might have passed.
Perhaps less.
A branch moved.
Footsteps came from beneath the trees.
Slow ones.
The young soldier stepped into the clearing.
Daro blinked.
Nobody around him made a sound.
The boy stood where he had emerged before, beneath the same trees, wearing the same torn coat. The blood remained on the cloth. Dust covered one knee. The right trouser leg was still split.
There was no blood on his face.
The little scar beside the eyebrow was there.
Daro looked at the ground.
The torn nail remained in the dirt.
When he looked back, the soldier had begun walking toward them.
He came without hurry.
His limp was gone.
The arm that had dragged uselessly during his run now swung loosely at his side. He passed the place where the red cord had caught him and stepped across the furrows his hands had made.
One of the women behind Daro whispered something.
Her husband covered her mouth.
The soldier kept coming.
Ten paces.
Seven.
Mena moved closer to Daro.
The dogs began backing away from him.
Not barking.
Just moving.
One crawled beneath a sleeping platform and turned its face toward the wall.
The soldier stopped in front of Daro.
His breathing was even.
There was a small dark stain at the collar of his shirt.
Daro's eyes dropped to his hands.
Ten fingernails.
Whole.
The young man's gaze followed his.
A pause.
Then he looked back up.
Something familiar sat behind the borrowed eyes.
Daro had seen it beside the river.
Seen it under the moon.
Not the face.
The way the face watched.
The young soldier smiled.
A small, almost courteous movement.
When he spoke, the words were Daro's.
Not badly pronounced. Not pieced together from fragments. The consonants sat where they were supposed to. The vowels carried the valley's shape.
"Thank you for hosting me."
No one answered.
Nathan looked past Daro at the houses.
His eyes moved over the village without lingering anywhere. The grain stores. The goat pens. The meeting tree. The huts where children were being held back from the doorways.
Then he stepped around Daro and continued walking.
Mena turned with him.
Everyone did.
Nathan crossed the village in the young soldier's body.
A man near the well moved aside before Nathan reached him. A child stared from between his mother's arms. Nathan glanced at the boy and the mother pulled him closer.
At the southern edge of the village stood the road.
Nathan reached it and paused.
He looked down at himself briefly, brushed a little dirt from the torn coat, then started south.
Daro stood where Nathan had left him.
The sun had gone completely now.
The first stars were appearing above the mountains.
No one spoke until the figure on the road had become small.
Mena looked toward the northern trees.
Then toward Nathan.
"The boy…"
Daro looked at the gouges in the earth.
The torn nail.
A smear of blood where the soldier's face had struck the ground.
Farther away, the same coat moved down the road.
The same head.
The same narrow shoulders.
The same stride, except the limp was gone.
Bekele sat slowly on the ground beside the meeting tree.
Kalla had not lowered his spear.
Someone crossed to where the nail lay and stared at it without touching it.
Daro remembered the young soldier laughing that morning. The easy grin toward the girls. The way he had adjusted the rifle strap before disappearing beneath the branches.
Nathan reached the bend in the road.
For a moment the last of the evening light caught his face.
Then he went around the curve.
The road was empty.
The villagers remained where they were.
Behind them the forest had gone quiet.
No voices came from the trees.
No red wolf moved between the trunks.
The branches stood still.
Daro listened for a long while.
Nothing.
He turned toward the road again.
Beyond the bend lay another village.
Beyond that another.
There were soldiers on those roads. Traders. Pilgrims. Families moving cattle. Men travelling under the emperor's banners.
A young imperial soldier walking alone would not need to explain very much.
Mena came beside him.
"He spoke like us."
Daro nodded.
She looked down at the torn nail in the dirt.
Neither of them went near it.
Long after the village fires had been lit, Daro remained outside his house looking toward the southern road. Once, far away, he thought he heard a wolf call from somewhere beyond the ridge.
He waited for it to come again.
It never did.