characteristics in my mind. She was invulnerable, she was stupid, and she was lonely. Those last two clicked together in my mind. I loped to the edge of the city, focused my will on a thicket a few miles south of the mountain, and set fire to it.
The dragon screeched and swooped off toward my fire, belching out her own flames as she went.
‘One wonders why you did that.’
‘Fire is a part of the mating ritual of her kind.’
‘How remarkable. Most birds mate in the spring.’
‘She is not exactly a bird. One thinks that we should leave these mountains immediately. There are strange things taking place here that one does not understand, and we have errands to attend to in the lowlands.’
She sighed. ‘It is always errands with you, isn’t it?’
‘It is the nature of the man-things,’ I told her.
‘But you are not a man-thing right now.’
I couldn’t dispute her logic, but we left anyway, and we reached Arendia two days later.
The tasks my Master had set for me involved certain Arends and some Tolnedrans. At the time, I didn’t understand why the Master was so interested in weddings. I understand now, of course. Certain people needed to be born, and I was out there laying ground work for all I was worth.
I’d rather thought that the presence of my companion might complicate things, but as it turned out, she was an advantage, since you definitely get noticed when you walk into an Arendish village or a Tolnedran town with a full-grown wolf at your side, and her presence did tend to make people listen to me.
Arranging marriages in those days wasn’t really all that difficult. The Arends – and to a somewhat lesser degree the Tolnedrans – had patriarchal notions, and children were supposed to obey their fathers in important matters. Thus, I was seldom obliged to try to convince the happy couple that they ought to get married. I talked with their fathers instead. I had a certain celebrity in those days. The war was still fresh in everybody’s mind, and my brothers and I had played fairly major roles in that conflict. Moreover, I soon found that the priesthood in both Arendia and Tolnedra could be very helpful. After I’d been through the whole business a couple of times, I began to develop a pattern. When the wolf and I went into a town, we’d immediately go to the temple of either Chaldan or Nedra. I’d identify myself and ask the local priests to introduce me to the fathers in question.
It didn’t always go smoothly, of course. Every so often I’d come across stubborn men who for one reason or another didn’t care for my choice of spouses for their children. If worse came to worst, though, I could always give them a little demonstration of what I could do about things that irritated me. That was usually enough to bring them around to my way of thinking.
‘One wonders why all of this is necessary,’ my companion said to me as we were leaving one Arendish village after I’d finally persuaded a particularly difficult man that his daughter’s happiness – and his own health – depended on the girl’s marriage to the young fellow we’d selected for her.
‘They will produce young ones,’ I tried to explain.
‘What an amazing thing,’ she responded dryly. A wolf can fill the simplest statement with all sorts of ironic implications. ‘Is that not the usual purpose of mating?’
‘Our purpose is to produce specific young ones.’
‘Why? One puppy is much like another, is it not? Character is developed in the rearing, not in the blood-line.’
We argued about that off and on for centuries, and I strongly suspect her of arguing largely because she knew that it irritated me. Technically, I was the leader of our odd little pack, but she wasn’t going to let me get above myself.
Arendia was a mournful sort of place in those days. The melancholy institution of serfdom had been well-established among the Arends even before the war with the Angaraks, and they brought it with them when they migrated to the west. I’ve never understood why anyone would submit to being a serf in the first place, but I suppose the Arendish character might have had something to do with it. Arends go to war with each other on the slightest pretext, and an ordinary farmer needs someone around to protect him from belligerent neighbors.
The lands the Arends had occupied in the central part of the continent had been open, and the fields had long been under cultivation. Their new home was a tangled forest, so they had to clear away the trees before they could plant anything. This was the work that fell to the serfs. The wolf and I soon became accustomed to seeing naked people chopping at trees. ‘One wonders why they take off their fur to do this,’ she said to me on one occasion. There’s no word in wolfish for ‘clothing,’ so she had to improvise.
‘It is because they only have one of the things they cover their bodies with. They put them aside while they are hitting the trees because they do not want them to be wounded while they work.’ I decided not to go into the question of the poverty of the serfs nor of the expense of a new canvas smock. The discussion was complicated enough already. How do you explain the concept of ownership to a creature that has no need for possessions of any kind?
‘This covering and uncovering of their bodies that the man-things do is foolishness,’ she declared. ‘Why do they do it?’
‘For warmth when it is cold.’
‘But they also do it when it is not cold. Why?’
‘For modesty, I suppose.’
‘What is modesty?’
I sighed. I wasn’t making much headway here. ‘It is just a custom among the man-things,’ I told her.
‘Oh. If it is a custom, it is all right,’ Wolves have an enormous respect for customs. Then she immediately thought of something else. She was always thinking of something else. ‘If it is the custom among man-things to cover their bodies sometimes but not others, it is not much of a custom, is it?’
I gave up. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Probably not.’
She dropped to her haunches in the middle of the forest path we were following with her tongue lolling out in wolfish laughter.
‘Do you mind?’ I demanded.
‘One is merely amused by the inconsistencies of the man-side of your thought,’ she replied. ‘If you would take your true form, your thought would run more smoothly.’ She was still convinced that I was really a wolf and that my frequent change of form was no more than a personal idiosyncrasy.
In the forests of Arendia, we frequently encountered the almost ubiquitous bands of outlaws. Not all of the serfs docilely accepted their condition. I don’t like having people point arrows at me, so after the first time or two, I went wolf as soon as we were out of sight of the village we’d just left. Even the stupidest runaway serf isn’t going to argue with a couple of full-grown wolves. That’s one of the things that’s always been a trial to me. People are forever interfering with me when I’ve got something to attend to. Why can’t they just leave me alone?
We went down into Tolnedra after a number of years, and I continued my activities as a marriage-broker, ultimately winding up in Tol Nedrane.
Don’t
