The Wolves Eat Well This Year, Chapter 5
Friday, 29 October 2010 05:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
teakayTitle: The Wolves Eat Well This Year
Fandom: Old World of Darkness (Werewolf: the Apocalypse)
Genre: Drama/Angst/Friendship
Rating: R
Word Count: ~9400
Summary: The year is 1940, and the death toll of the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union continues to mount. In the midst of this, a lost cub in the Red Army undergoes his First Change and finds himself at the mercy of Finnish Garou, contending with a destiny he doesn’t want.
Disclaimer: The Old World of Darkness and associated thingamabobbers aren’t mine.
Author’s Notes and Warnings: Finally managed to earmark some time to polish up another installment.
Contains violence and language, references to rape and torture, internalized homophobia and other values dissonance. On a lighter note, some bizarre but hopefully discreet shout-outs. Please note that the views of these characters certainly don’t always match my own.
Previous chapter here. First chapter here.
Chapter Five: Falcon and Cuckoo
The next time, Laukkanen started by saying he’d written to the Silver Fangs – strictly speaking, to one he was acquainted with, who would pass it on to his elders. Then, as Laukkanen had pledged, they entered the Umbra.
Aleksandr had wondered if alcohol might be involved – if in the end, after this one fantastic thing, the rest would be about as magical and inexplicable as an old-fashioned church service. Why wouldn’t werewolves be susceptible to religion? But when the door was latched Laukkanen brought out a small mirror (similar to the one they’d lent him at the sept to shave), and gave him instructions. After minutes of staring in the mirror (laid on the table – Laukkanen explained this was so it wouldn’t hit the floor when he vanished) and feeling his eyes go loose and unfocused and several times automatically stopping himself from what felt like some inner fall, almost like falling asleep – Laukkanen, apparently knowing each time it happened, making noises of reassurance – he finally plunged headlong.
“Like it?” Laukkanen eventually asked him from behind him. Aleksandr wondered if it was imagination that he sounded so smug about it. While he hadn’t proclaimed skepticism, neither had he put up a pretense of enthusiasm for the idea.
Enthusiasm still wasn’t forthcoming, though blank frozen shock now steadily ebbed. Had he seen a place like this in some dream he hadn’t quite remembered? It seemed altogether like a dream-place – vague and misted. But there was the moon. The pine trees loomed over them. No walls or ceiling to block them out. No dugouts, no other people, only various somethings flitting here and there.
“The Penumbra,” Laukkanen announced. Aleksandr turned and saw him driving something several centimeters deep into what passed for ground. A rag knotted at the top of a branch – a makeshift flag. “I’ll try not to take too long, and remind me to check back. If something comes up and they figure out you’re not there in that world, it might be awkward. I’m leaving this so we know where to step back – the house doesn’t exist here, you see. Too new. It might start echoing in a few more years. Now,” and he pointed, “have a look at that Gaffling.”
***
Nobody attacked and nobody barged in on Jokela, so they stepped out of the Penumbra at the end of the lesson without incident. Aleksandr looking lost wasn’t exactly infrequent, but he was so evidently distracted by this new revelation that Elias decided that was enough teaching for the night. That wasn’t too bad – he needed to pay more attention to his other fellows, anyway. He hadn’t made sergeant for nothing.
With the others there was a little more teasing about Aleksandr, even one joke that there’d be a wedding in Jokela’s office any day now (if they actually knew the half of it, Elias told himself, they’d likely be more vicious, because maybe some would be secretly all right with men fucking men and others all right with fucking Russians, but both? “I wouldn’t marry him any more than I’d marry Alex,” he told the joker. This was true), but either they accepted it or, after his reprimand to Nieminen, they knew to hide their lack of acceptance.
And many of them grew more accepting of Aleksandr with each day and night, he thought, trying to observe demeanors with all the vigilance he hadn’t displayed in the fiasco of a first day. In fact a number, starting with Corporal Salo, seemed almost to adopt him. If Elias was supposedly taking him in as a surrogate kid cousin, they served as the rest of the sprawling extended family – an assortment of gruff uncles and older cousins (always older cousins, despite the actual relativities of some of the birthdays). Aleksandr’s Finnish was more than broken – it was shattered, pulverized even, but he made an effort to use it, and this endeared him further to this group; some even took it upon themselves to teach him more in their spare time. One word they taught him was Santeri, short for Aleksanteri, the Finnish form of his name; in this way they rebaptized him (if he’d ever been baptized to begin with; there certainly wasn’t the residue of a Kin-Fetch’s kiss in evidence). Aleksandr collected vocabulary and cigarettes, had no trouble getting razor blades for shaving and light-ups for the cigarettes; he remained lanky, but he was eating more and it showed.
A few days in, Elias started to see him smiling. Not at him, and they were nervous smiles, still, as he said “Thank you” and so on, but they were a pleasant surprise, maybe even gratifying, except in the grand scheme how much had he done to bring them on? This was underlined when he mentioned it to Jokela. “I wasn’t sure he could smile,” he said.
“He could,” said Jokela. “He did on the first night, but you weren’t there at the time.”
“When was that?”
“After I checked his ankle.”
After Jokela healed his ankle, he meant (this being in his office with an open door), and Elias told himself it was ridiculous to be so disappointed about it.
***
Aleksandr smoked more often now. Before, when tobacco happened to come into his possession, there was always someone who wanted it more than he did, so he kept giving it to Mikhail or otherwise trading it away for something more appealing (did this count as speculation, he wondered when he was especially nervous). But now some of the Finns plied him with cigarettes which he found he preferred to the ones at home, and there wasn’t anyone to pass them to, so he occasionally indulged himself; the stock in his pockets continued to grow.
He was smoking outside, Salo beside him, when he saw a group of Finns entering the camp in triumph with a well-fed horse hauling a sled. The sled was painted white and piled high with supplies, and when it came closer he saw the boxes and cans and barrels were labeled in Russian. Meat, beans, tea, soup powder, bread, butter. Spoils from another destroyed encirclement? They dragged all this to the field kitchen as Aleksandr stared after them, the cigarette burning down in his hand until Salo said “Santeri!” in warning.
Later that night Laukkanen explained, with some embarrassment (at least there was that), that they intercepted messages and faked aerial signals so that the planes dropping food into the encirclements dropped it on the Finns instead. “Sometimes they get wise and drop Molotov’s sort of bread,” Laukkanen said, by which he meant bombs (for some reason Molotov the foreign minister, not Stalin or even Voroshilov as he might have supposed, was the symbolic target of their ire, and Aleksandr turned over the idea of asking about the reasoning behind that), “so we don’t put the signal too close.”
That was a reminder, the way the occasional faint sounds that carried from the nearest encirclement were a smaller reminder. For a little while he didn’t want to eat. Not when he thought of gaunt faces turned up to the sky. But not eating wouldn’t somehow feed them, only leave more for the Finns, and maybe it was something that someone like the intended recipients would have it. He wasn’t sure how much of this decision was swayed by not wanting to stop eating, but he had his self-suspicions.
***
Elias continued the lessons, whatever he could think of. These nights he only called on Jokela when absolute privacy was necessary; otherwise, the dugout or the front room served, voices low in case some of the others understood more Russian than they let on. The sauna might have served as well, but the thought of the last time they’d shared it made him reluctant to suggest it again, because even if he meant nothing by it he still wasn’t sure how Aleksandr would hear it. He drilled Aleksandr on the Litany, had him keep practice shifting, took him on several more jaunts into the Penumbra. Garou glyphs, on the side, and acquainting him with the simple language of wolves that Garou understood by instinct. A review of the thirteen tribes – he didn’t go very far into the Silver Fangs because the Silver Fangs themselves could do it better. So more about the Get of Fenris, then the Children of Gaia, the Shadow Lords, the Glass Walkers, the Bone Gnawers –
“Ha,” he said. “The Bone Gnawers. Well.”
This time Aleksandr went so far as to prompt. “What about them?”
“Twenty-five years ago I’d tell you that the thing about the Bone Gnawers is they’re all as poor as mud. If there’s a crack, they’ll fall through it. They live in the countryside and the city, and they’re lucky if they can keep hold of a shack. Mostly, it’s the gutter, in places that have a gutter. But at least all that time in the gutter means they’ve got a tendency to be tough. They’re good at keeping alive, at least.”
“Twenty-five years ago?”
“Right. Or, let’s see, twenty-three, to cut it close. I’m sure you’ve learned in school –” Aleksandr looked like he grasped what Elias was getting at. “– about how you had the Bolsheviks and so on. Well, as far as I know, it seems it took the fancy of a lot of the Russian Bone Gnawers.” A lot of the Finnish ones, too… he thought inevitably of Toivo, and winced. “They thought it was a good chance at clawing their way out of the gutter. I don’t suppose you have any idea how well that’s working out for them.”
“I don’t.”
“Ah well. And out here, some are still trying. I know a Ragabash – Toivo Järvinen – who managed to get an apartment in Tampere, and has a job that pays the rent. That’s his way of showing his Ragabash contrariness, he says – being settled in a proper home with Tyyne and Anja. That’s his wife and little girl, by the way. But then he’s concentrated so hard on getting himself settled, and on keeping himself settled, that he’s not paying as much attention as he might to Garou matters. He’s a fostern, and he looks like he’ll be one for a long while even as Bone Gnawers go. I’ve asked him if it’s really worth the effort, and he’s told me to do charach with myself. Charach,” he explained, “is the term for when Garou mates with Garou. But he’s decent when you get him to take a look outside his door. And he does some great drawings when he has the money for it.”
As he was taking the pictures from his sleeve and spreading them out by way of edification, he saw that has-questions-but-forget-about-hearing-them look. Elias had not, as of yet, hit on a reliable method to induce him to forget about forgetting about it.
He kept trying. “You look like you have something to say about it.”
This time he got lucky and Aleksandr said more than a token little thing about it. “I was wondering. Is he…?”
“Yes?” Elias said after a few seconds of trying to figure out whether that would prompt him or cut him off this time.
“You said he’s trying to have a life like the ones at home tried. Is he also a… is he…?”
Well, it wasn’t as if Elias had tried particularly hard to hide it. Maybe some part of him had put it out there for Aleksandr to piece it together. “I think he votes Social Democrat, actually. Not all the way…” He flapped his left hand. “… but in the general direction, yes.”
“Oh.” And he still had that look, but Elias had no more luck getting more out of him.
***
Aleksandr reached, and reached, and one night he had a catch larger than usual. He dreamed of someone he was fairly sure was the woman on the horse he’d been reaching for. This time someone else said a name, and she turned toward it. This startled him so much that the whole thing nearly broke apart before he could get hold of the name.
When he woke up he scrambled after that dream, dragged it back up, kept his eyes closed as he mouthed it over and over, anchoring in reality.
***
Then the Silent Striders, the Black Furies, the Fianna, the Stargazers, the Red Talons, the Uktena and Wendigo. Finally, the Black Spiral Dancers – “They don’t show their faces around here often, but when they do we kick them in straightaway.”
After that he started on a brief history of the Garou – Aleksandr’s eyes got big and he got that look again when they reached the period of the Impergium, and this time he kept his mouth well shut. Elias wondered for a bit if he should’ve saved that particular era for later, but that was getting ridiculous – the cub would have to find out eventually. And he was pretty sure his eyes had popped, too, when he’d first heard about it, and he remembered Marita’s exclamations from beside him, so he repeated what Jalmari and Answers-Storm had told them about how they had put a stop to the Impergium in the end, and for damn good reason. He had no idea what good it did in this case.
This happened all over again when they got to the War of Rage – Aleksandr’s big eyes, Elias’s don’t-worry-never-again-and-hey-there’s-still-the-Corax – but at least there didn’t seem to be quite the same visceral horror. Aleksandr knew humans; he’d never have known a Gurahl.
And night after night he went sniping at the motti, went raiding with the others, dreamed of switching to kicking in Black Spiral Dancers’ ugly mugs.
And one of those nights, he heard someone else’s howls. Still at considerable distance – better too far, they’d figure, than too close. He howled back. Here, we’re here.
After he got back, he told this to Aleksandr. “We’ll be expecting them soon.”
He wasn’t sure it was a very accurate comparison, but the color of Aleksandr’s face put him in mind of spoiled milk. Maybe he was only interpreting it around its expression. “Oh.”
They don’t bite, he almost said, but that wasn’t, strictly speaking, true. He settled for, “I don’t think they’ll bite you.”
“How should I… behave?”
“Well, you’re a cub, and a lost one at that, so they won’t expect you to have the protocol memorized. Just remember your rhyas and follow my lead.” His color didn’t much improve. “Are you worried about anything specific?”
He was about to write it off as another forget-about-asking when Aleksandr said, in a rush (when he spoke beyond the simplest sentences it seemed always headlong rushing or constant hesitation or both), “I know you said I’m one of them, I know, but I don’t know about them, how they do things, if I’ll say something like… Leningrad, and they’ll be… be…”
Elias waited to be sure he wouldn’t finish the sentence, then cogitated further while he was at it. “They know how things are in Russia now,” he said once done cogitating, “and vaunted alphas that they are they’d be idiots not to take that into account. But, much as I’d still like you to understand I won’t take you out and shoot you for saying something I don’t like, I expect you can’t go so wrong just with how you are. It’s not as though you normally go about raving about, what’s it called, Soviet power and so on, do you? You’ll be all right. All right?”
“All right,” Aleksandr lied blatantly, but besides what reassurances he could think of Elias couldn’t do anything about it, as per usual.
Instead he kept on teaching Aleksandr the glyphs, drawing on scraps of paper he’d feed into the fire afterward. The forms, the auspices. The Silver Fangs’ pawful of claws or set of sharp teeth, the Get of Fenris’s wolf-born-of-wolf. Aleksandr particularly stared at that one. “We had it first,” Elias told him.
He took a little time to go back into the Penumbra and replace the crude flag he’d planted at the house. This time the branch was one he sawed off one of the spirit-shadows of trees on this side, with all due respects paid to the spirits involved. This one was larger, more visible from a distance – though admittedly, with all the trees around this didn’t do much.
The next night they were closer. Not quite the formal Howl of Introduction, but establishing: We’re here. Where are you? And we are – two homid Galliards of the Silver Fangs, he gathered from their intonations. Not, then, the one he’d addressed the talen to – Kirill Belyev, who was a Theurge.
That night, coming back from his patrol, Elias gave notice to Kustaa before taking lupus and howling back. Then it was back and forth, Kustaa skiing along behind him, until he met the two silvery wolves between the trees.
One after another, they slipped back into homid. The Silver Fangs turned out to be a man and woman – tall, sturdy, and with that same look gleaming in the moonlight, the moonlight which also gleamed on metal at hands and throat. A dedicated bag hung over the woman’s shoulder. Elias thought himself back into formalities and greeted them with all the due ceremony to be had. In turn, they introduced themselves in full form: Filipp Gennadyevich Zvezdin and Svetlana Konstantinovna Volkovskaya.
“Where is the cub?” asked Volkovskaya.
“He awaits you at camp. If you would prefer, I can direct you through the Penumbra.”
They very much preferred this and so, throwing in a few apologies all around, Elias shucked his skis and rifle (you’d have to be a Glass Walker and hence default urrah not to be chewed out for dedicating a Weaver-thing like that), lent them his mirror to step sideways, and showed them to his marker. He’d been through the forest enough times in the past weeks that even in the Penumbra finding his way back wasn’t too difficult.
“We would like to know,” said Zvezdin, “the circumstances in which you discovered this cub.”
He retold the story as they walked: the howling, the Warder’s discovery, the mutual lack of comprehension, the dispatch to the camp. Volkovskaya said the same thing he’d thought: “It would have made matters simpler if Cuts-Down-The-Wyrm had notified us while the cub was at the sept.”
“I am afraid he did not see fit to inform me of his reasoning. However, he did grant me leave to use my own discretion in this matter, so once I had determined that he was a cub, I believed I should contact his tribemates.”
“I see. How old is he?”
“Nineteen.”
“Fairly old for the First Change,” said Zvezdin, “but not impossible. I understand that Cuts-Down-The-Wyrm may have wished to verify his status, but in matters pertaining to our tribe he should have left this to us to determine. No Kin-Fetch attended him?”
“None that we saw, and we found no baptismal mark.”
“Hm. He was with the Red Army, you said?”
“Yes, he was a conscript.”
“Hm.”
“You said in your message,” said Volkovskaya, “that you believed an ancestor of his had visited the sept?”
“Yes. I believe a dream of his ancestor helped lead him there.” And he recounted Aleksandr’s dream of the rider in the forest. Volkovskaya made noises of vague affirmation.
The brief journey passed even faster with questions of this kind. Once at the marker, he peered through the Gauntlet to be sure no mischievous spirit had relocated it. Then he left them, with a few more apologies (couldn’t go wrong with those) and found his way back to Kustaa, who’d kicked himself out of his skis and now paced impatient circles in the snow. There, he apologized again and slipped back into his gear, and they set off for camp together.
Aleksandr, awake when they entered the dugout, was promptly on his feet, leaving the hat behind atop the book of Tolstoy. A hurried stroll to the house followed, Elias wondering if, with his spoiled-milk complexion, Aleksandr might even be in so bad a way as to spew his dinner on the pair. The image was funny, but for Aleksandr’s sake he hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
“We’ll meet them in the Penumbra,” said Elias as he latched the door. “That way if anyone’s eavesdropping they won’t hear two extra people.” He turned and got out the mirror again. “I’ll keep watch through the Gauntlet to be sure nothing’s going on back here, and to know if we have to step back through. I’ll come up now and again, in case you need me to say something, but I’ve already told them about everything that only I could tell them. Will you be all right on your own?” The next second he realized it was a stupid question. If he thought he wouldn’t be all right, and odds were this was what he was thinking, there wasn’t much Elias could do about it.
Whatever he thought, though, what Aleksandr said, back stiff, was “Yes.”
Elias turned and thanked Jokela, who looked up from his hasty setup and nodded at them. They’d worked out signals – sound might not get through intact, but if, say, he stood his Russian dictionary in a certain position on the desk, that meant they had to get back through immediately before someone had to be let in to see they’d vanished. Also, he saw, Jokela had the forethought to lay out a half-finished game of cards for them to snatch up – the kind of game where speaking wasn’t necessary. To be certain, Elias spent another two minutes teaching Aleksandr the basics in case they were called upon to continue play. Then, after a last look around, Elias held out the mirror.
On the other side, Luna’s hazy light came through clearest in the piece of Penumbra containing shadows of neither house nor trees. In his absence the Silver Fangs had lit a lantern, which Volkovskaya had set down before her as she consulted some massive leather-bound tome; hence, he had an even better view of them. He pegged Zvezdin as having maybe a decade on Cuts-Down-The-Wyrm; Volkovskaya, meanwhile, he guessed at around her thirties.
More introductions, with all the pomp Elias could call up without feeling like a complete windbag. When he gave Volkovskaya’s name, it was sheer happenstance that Aleksandr’s soft gasp fit in the space between words. Volkovskaya raised an eyebrow but nodded to Elias to continue.
And he continued, up to – “Honored elders, I present Aleksandr Sergeyevich Novikov, a cub of your blood. Now, if you will pray excuse me?”
“Yes, go on,” said Zvezdin. “Now, child, let us have a closer look at you.”
The way Aleksandr stumbled toward them, one would think his ankle was still twisted. Elias withdrew, staying close enough to keep a view of the room on the other side of the Gauntlet; as he tried to concentrate on that view, he heard Volkovskaya say, “You have heard the name?”
Aleksandr replied, “Yes.”
“Where was this?”
“I’ve heard it before, I think, but the last time I heard it was in a dream. Princess Yelizaveta Yuriyevna Volkovskaya?”
***
The Volkovskaya in front of him looked briefly and pleasantly surprised, and nodded. “Yes. That sounds correct. When did you have such a dream?”
“A few nights ago.” More had come after.
“Hunts-With-Mielikki tells me that earlier you dreamed of a woman paying a visit to the Finnish Garou. Was this the same woman?”
“I think so. I also heard Kanyukova.”
“And Hunts-With-Mielikki did not mention the name to you prior?”
“No.”
“You never heard this specific name before?”
“I don’t remember hearing it before.”
“That very nearly confirms it. After his account of this potential vision, we examined our tribal records for possible candidates.” Pages rustled as she consulted her book. “Princess Volkovskaya is my ancestor, and her Garou name was Yelizaveta Kanyukova – this was also her human name before she married Prince Volkovsky. She paid a visit to the Sept of Silent Birds in the year 1810, to mark the transition of the protectorate from House Gleaming Eye to Clan Crescent Moon. It is highly likely that you share blood with her, and therefore with me. Now, cousin, if you would allow me…”
She put the book under her arm, picked up the lantern, and took a few steps closer. Aleksandr kept still as she scrutinized him, holding the lantern close – “Chin up, if you would” – and turned to the old man, Zvezdin. “He has the Volkovsky look, does he not?”
Now it was Zvezdin’s turn to step closer while Volkovskaya went to the side and gave him the lantern. Aleksandr tried even harder not to look away, not to squirm. He imagined suddenly that this, too, might be a bad dream or worse; he uprooted these ideas as fast as he could, because if all this had been delusion there was no help for him. Behind Zvezdin he could just see Laukkanen, facing away, stock-still, and tried not to make it too obvious that he kept looking at that because, as with Ilmari Cuts-Down-The-Wyrm, it was especially hard to look back into Zvezdin’s eyes for too long.
At last Zvezdin stepped back, proclaiming as he returned the lantern, “There is a resemblance, especially in the face. As a matter of fact, Svetlana Konstantinovna, I would say that his look is particularly reminiscent of your father, though the personality is evidently quite different.”
Aleksandr thought, in unspoken reply, of his mother. It was a bit embarrassing to say a boy got his face from his mother, but for the most part that had been the case for him as well as for his brothers. They shared much of the same bone structure, and the same eyes. Their hair was their father’s, and Aleksandr and Mikhail had also inherited his lanky body, though their height came from both parents.
He put it together, chain links: If he looked like this Konstantin Volkovsky and he also looked like his mother, then his mother –
– and there had been the denunciation, no matter what hadn’t come of it –
– but that was, that was…
“But Father stayed behind alone. Not even Mother remained with him. Do you think perhaps he…?”
“I had the acquaintance of Konstantin Anatolyevich from boyhood, and that does not seem at all unlikely.”
None of the relatives Aleksandr knew of had that name and patronymic; then again, he didn’t know of many. His father was Sergey Mikhailovich, and his grandfathers had been Mikhail Trofimovich Novikov and Aleksandr Kuzmich Smirnov. This didn’t reassure him much, not when he knew that a former would have definite motive to lie about it, and motive not to pass on the secret when the walls were so thin.
And not when he knew what Laukkanen had said, those nights ago, though he still couldn’t imagine his mother or grandmother doing anything of the kind.
Zvezdin had turned to him again. “Now then, cub, can you assume lupus form?”
He could, and once he did so there followed another two rounds of scrutiny with the lantern, punctuated by further instructions to lift his head and so on. Zvezdin murmured various things he didn’t quite comprehend; Volkovskaya listened to Zvezdin and murmured acknowledgment and occasional reply.
For example, “Hm. Quite extensive streaking. Unusual given his ancestry. For all his wild ways, your father was extremely well-bred.”
“Perhaps his mate was not quite as well-bred?”
“Likely so.”
Aleksandr wondered if the blood going to his face might show through the wolf’s fur.
Eventually this, too, ended. “I would like to ask you some questions,” Zvezdin told him.
Aleksandr understood – he dropped lupus and fell into his normal shape in that easy way, much easier than working the opposite direction. He stood and pushed himself into meeting Zvezdin’s eye.
Zvezdin began, “Might you have heard the name Volkovsky mentioned among your family?”
“Once, that I remember.” He picked it up outside his family, too, in passing – one of the prominent families before the Revolution. “My mother’s family used to live in Zimovo, and my grandmother said they came riding by a lot.”
“Zimovo village?”
“Yes.”
“What was your grandmother’s name? The one she used, at any rate.”
“Praskovya Gerasimovna Smirnova – when she was married. Kharitonova, before that.”
“Your grandfather?”
Aleksandr gradually recounted both sets of grandparents; Volkovskaya consulted her book and Zvezdin frowned. “None of those names match those of any of our Kinfolk families. Are you absolutely certain that they are not assumed?”
“No, but if they are I don’t know about it.”
“Now, on your father’s side – what were your grandparents’ occupations?”
The answer came quite easily, as thing to be ideologically proud of tended to. “My grandfather worked in a factory and my grandmother worked in a bakery.”
“Did they?”
“That’s what my father said.”
“And what were they on your mother’s side?”
“Peasants.” When they looked like they didn’t think they heard it right he repeated, quickly, “They were peasants.” And there was nothing wrong with that. It wasn’t as if they’d been rich peasants, kulaks, as if they’d ever lived at the expense of anyone else, which was more than could be said for the Volkovskys and almost certainly the Zvezdins. He had no reason to be ashamed. But Zvezdin and Volkovskaya, staring at him, made him feel as though he should be.
Volkovskaya said, very slowly and gently, “Cousin, please understand that you are among allies now. We are aware that our tribemates still in Russia are ill-treated and dispossessed by the humans in power, and they have good reason to keep silent as to their proper status for much the same reason as the Veil must be upheld. But there is no need to conceal anything of the kind from us.”
He looked at her; she looked back. He looked at Laukkanen, still standing there. Laukkanen had told him that if you looked back to the other side like that you couldn’t pay attention to the side you were on, that the only thing that could snap you out of it was pain, was wounds.
He looked back to her and said, about as slowly, “Once someone said my mother was –” He bit his tongue on “former,” imagined it would grate on their ears like “Leningrad.” “– was a noble, in disguise. They looked into her background. But they didn’t find anything that wasn’t as she said it was, and I think if there was anything…”
“Ah,” said Volkovskaya. “Obviously, there is something.”
Now there was no fur to cover his embarrassment. “I know. I’m sorry.”
But still, they were so thorough. Especially then; it hadn’t been long after Kirov’s murder and everyone was on the lookout.
“Your face doesn’t lie, cousin, and there must have been a reason for someone to say such a thing. Perhaps your past was so well-concealed as to escape their knowledge, but your look was the reason – perhaps some disgruntled Red Bone Gnawer recognized her for what she was, even if it was unable to convince its human accomplices. Do you resemble your mother, do you think?”
“Yes, besides, um…”
Zvezdin’s frown was very deep now. “I am afraid I am not as optimistic as you, Svetlana Konstantinovna.”
“How do you mean, Filipp Gennadyevich-rhya?”
“Consider all the circumstances. Consider that he does not bear the mark of the Baptism of Fire, and that the Volkovsky Kin-Fetch did not visit the Sept of Silent Birds. Consider that he knew nothing of his heritage – consider that he himself admits he has no inkling of nobility in his ancestry. Consider that though he may share blood with Yelizaveta Yuriyevna Kanyukova, and with the ancient line of the Volkovskys, the manifestation of this is unduly marred in comparison to your own or your father’s – it is an imprecise science, to be sure, but I highly doubt that a mate from within the tribe could have brought his breeding so low in one generation. Consider, finally, the habits of your father, by far the most viable candidate. Consider his profligate ways before the rise of Bolshevism, and the likelihood that at some point this profligacy produced at least one bastard.”
In the normal course of things, Aleksandr was quite used to people talking in front of him but not to him. It wasn’t as though he particularly minded that in itself; it would be silly to mind, given that he avoided attention best as he could. But here, listening to Zvezdin talk about breeding – here, now, he was angry. He wanted to shout, howl, mark his existence.
He’d wanted to shout before, or just to speak when it came to some things. And as he had before, he kept his mouth closed.
Now they whispered together. He couldn’t hear them, and didn’t try very hard to.
Laukkanen turned around.
***
Elias took them in – the Galliards having a private conference, and behind them Aleksandr standing with clenched hands and lips pressed together tight – and wondered what he’d missed; his eavesdropping tendencies, discontented, wanted to have their fill now, but he shoved them down. “Pray excuse me. I hope matters are proceeding well?” he said, for courtesy’s sake, though Aleksandr at least didn’t seem to think so.
Zvezdin turned toward him. “They proceed fairly well. We would speak with you in a short while.”
Elias decided this meant he shouldn’t look through again. So he stood and watched as they finished up their whispering and turned toward him again.
“Elias Hunts-With-Mielikki,” began Zvezdin, “we thank you for bringing our attention to this matter. However, at this time it is our judgment that while the cub is clearly of Silver Fang stock, it is far less likely that he is suitable for the tribe proper.”
“Ah. That is… unfortunate.” Elias wondered briefly and wildly if in his nervousness Aleksandr had started raving about Soviet power.
“The circumstantial evidence suggests he is some natural descendant of the Volkovskys, born of the Ragabash Prince Konstantin Volkovsky’s mingling with commoners. Even if he were of impeccable lineage, which I must doubt given his own testimony, there is the indisputable and troubling fact that he has grown to this age taught nothing of his heritage and responsibilities. An improper upbringing leads to an improper attitude toward the responsibilities of rule.” His tone softened slightly. “We do not fault you for notifying us. We cannot expect those of other tribes to discern such subtleties.”
***
After the formal leave-takings, Aleksandr and Laukkanen stepped back into the house. Jokela nodded at them from the table and thanked Aleksandr when he cleared up the game of cards. They left immediately after.
“Well,” Laukkanen whispered to him halfway to the dugout, “I hope I didn’t get your hopes too high.”
“Oh no, you didn’t,” Aleksandr whispered back. He hadn’t had any hopes of that kind to be dashed; what he felt, instead, was an incredible relief. It couldn’t have been true, and it wasn’t true. He couldn’t possibly be a leader, and he wasn’t one.
Then again, rage continued to simmer at the back of his head. He was relieved, yes, that the Silver Fangs weren’t going to haul him into all of that, but in the opposite direction he was still indignant that they had rejected him. Rejected him like that. If it had only been a matter of him being unsuitable, he would’ve had no problem because it would be true, but it wasn’t just him, it was his whole family they’d brushed off – even Mikhail, the natural leader – and in a larger way all the people of their class. All that about commoners and lineage and bastards. They hadn’t sneered about it, but they were pitying, condescending, and in a way that was worse. With sneering he could fortify himself with a pure fury at them even if he never showed it, assure himself with vigor that this was the enemy he’d already learned about, tell himself not to be taken in.
And then again, Zvezdin had said clearly of Silver Fang stock, and that meant that still, at some point, something was…
His mother, no, it would be his grandmother…
Volkovskaya had still called him cousin, with that pitying look on her face.
Laukkanen went on as if he’d said yes. “It’s not so bad, not being a Silver Fang. Take me, for instance – I’m no Silver Fang. Though then again,” he continued, contemplatively, “I’m not sure you’re exactly Fenrir material. Though that’s not so bad either. A lot of Garou, actually, aren’t Fenrir material.”
And Laukkanen had been the one to tell him about the Bone Gnawers who lived in the gutter under the press of capitalism, then talk about one who’d escaped it with an air of disapproval, damning with faint praise. He seemed to think “Garou matters,” being another soldier in some endless war of spirits, ought to be altogether more important than this Järvinen feeding his daughter.
After all, he was a White. He might not be constantly shoving it into Aleksandr’s face, might not be torturing him like Malinovsky had said the Whites would (but Aleksandr was also Garou, and for a while Laukkanen had thought he was some secret prince of Garou atop that; would he have looked after an ordinary human in nearly the same way?), but it was still there, like the encirclements – he couldn’t see them from camp but he could hear sometimes, and imagine them.
“I mean, if all Garou had to be Fenrir or nothing, there’d be a whole lot less Garou in the world today, and we have enough trouble keeping our numbers up as it is…”
They ducked into the dugout. He whispered, “Laukkanen?”
“Yes?”
“Could I ask…?”
“Of course!”
“What tribe do you think I’ll be in, then?”
“Well, let’s see… I’d have a better idea if you spoke up more often, but…”
“I’m sorry.”
“There’s no need for that.” They shucked off their boots and leaned side-by-side against the wall in the dark, at a short distance from the huddle of sleeping bodies, blankets pulled up to their necks, heads turned toward one another. Laukkanen considered. “Right now, just roughly mind you, I’d say the Children of Gaia.”
He remembered what Laukkanen had said about them, when teaching him about the tribes. Some might say they’re too soft, but I figure they didn’t get to thriving up here shoulder-to-shoulder with us by being nothing but soft. You definitely don’t flop your way through a klaive duel with a Koskinen. It comes from how they try to smooth things out with everyone, get us all working together against the Wyrm, and to get hold of all of us they’re easier on the weakest of us. Sometimes they’re too easy, but that’s sometimes.
Laukkanen said now, “I suppose part of it’s actually how quiet you are. I guess some of that you chalk up to, you know, the situation, but are you, usually?”
“Yes, usually.” Always, he was tempted to say.
“Yes, well, not all Children of Gaia are quiet, definitely not all of them, but a lot of them are…” He gestured, abbreviated and vague. “… accommodating, like that.” By which he meant pliant, by which he meant weak? “Of course we’re all fighters, but some of us keep up the fight dawn to dusk to dawn and some of us don’t. Though I figure, just because you’d rather not, let’s say, smash liquor bottles over people’s heads every night doesn’t mean you can’t be brave where it really matters, against the Wyrm. Look at the captain – he’s Kinfolk, but it still holds for him. And as far as being brave…”
Laukkanen said nothing else for such a long time that Aleksandr thought that maybe he was meant to finish the sentence for himself, that it was self-evident (to Laukkanen). He looked away. The closest of the sleeping men muttered something and rolled onto his stomach, his arm flung out over Aleksandr’s feet.
“As far as being brave,” Laukkanen repeated at last, “there’s different varieties of bravery. Some you can see easier than others. Do you remember when you turned around, fought back, and nearly wounded me with my own puukko?”
After another pause to see if it was rhetorical, “Yes.”
“Now that was brave of you. That would be one variety, one of the easier ones. But do you remember when… the time in the sauna?”
He swallowed. “Yes.”
“I suppose a lot of people wouldn’t call it brave, and it’s not exactly glorious battle, but I think, yes, what you did in there… I mean to say, I think you were brave to say what you did.”
Aleksandr turned his head to face him again.
“I mean to say, when you thought you were going to die and you thought I would… when you said those things about how you would… when you told me how you would cooperate, and how for this you asked me not to spare your life but to spare your family trouble from it.” Laukkanen’s Russian had slipped into the cadence of the first two days. “In my opinion, it was brave of you there, as well, to willingly give up something of that sort.”
Brave? If he’d thought that using his mouth on Laukkanen in the French way would have saved his life, he probably would have done it to save his life, and surely Laukkanen wouldn’t call that brave. But as it was, as it had seemed, why ask for something so obviously out of reach? And even the kind of bravery Laukkanen thought was easy to pick out – if surviving was next to impossible, a quick death fighting was better than a slow one under the hands of torturers. He thought all this rather distantly – he was at a remove from his sick fear and resignation on that night, and was fairly certain now that it wouldn’t happen, not that way.
“I have given this some consideration, and if I were in such a situation as you feared you were in, I am not at all certain that I could do such a thing. But that is how I am. Generally speaking, my tribe swears by one sort of bravery. A number of my tribemates would disagree when I call you brave for such a thing – though those tribemates are not here and I am, so you may disregard their opinion. But when I think of that sort of bravery – that quiet sort – I associate it with the Children of Gaia. I can far more easily imagine one of them doing such a thing, though admittedly this is perhaps because I am not as well acquainted with them as with my fellow Fenrir. Yes. In my opinion, I believe you would do well with them.”
“Oh,” he said, to say something. Then he thought of something proper to say. “Thank you.”
“You are welcome.”
The next silence went on so long that by the end of it, Aleksandr had slid onto the floor of the dugout, wrapped in the blanket. He’d carefully moved the sleeping man’s outstretched hand out of the way, and now he looked at its shape – this close, in the dark, it didn’t look like a hand anymore. Laukkanen had joined him, and that seemed to be the end of it for the night, but then Laukkanen whispered again, behind him, “I have also been curious about a related matter.”
Aleksandr rolled back over, narrowly avoiding both Laukkanen and the hand. “Yes?”
“How did you come to believe that you would die? No. How did you come to believe that we would kill you?”
How, Aleksandr asked himself on the heels of that, blinking at what he could make out of Laukkanen’s face, was he supposed to reply?
It was his own turn to cogitate. He, too, stretched it out, mostly with mental circlings, until Laukkanen said, very gently, “There is no need to answer if you do not wish to.”
“No,” said Aleksandr. “I mean. I can answer.” Could there be any harm in telling him this? Some strategic value he was overlooking? Would Laukkanen take offense at hearing exactly what he’d asked for?
“I heard… I heard the Whites tortured people. That you… that they’d been doing it to their prisoners all the way back in the time of the revolution. In the fighting between the Whites and the Reds. ”
“The revolution…?” Laukkanen exhaled, a long lingering sigh. “Ah. The civil war. I see. Who told you?”
“Different places. I don’t remember every one exactly. Some of it was in the newspaper. The radio. Komsomol meetings. People talked about it. Politruk Malinovsky talked about it.”
“Go on.”
“And you… and they were leaving bodies, outside of camp. Other people found them and said there were… were pieces, missing.”
This exhalation came out half a whistle. Astonished, maybe, incredulous. “Maybe the wolves were at them. Regular wolves. We don’t eat humans, but our Kin don’t always pay attention to that.”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see. But everyone was talking about them. They said –”
Some of them, pants at their ankles and cocks chopped –
“– they said, some of the men were… they had their… they were… they’d been undressed. Castrated.” And could regular wolves undo buttons and pull down drawers, he didn’t need to say.
Another whistling exhalation.
“And… I didn’t hear so much about it, but I did hear…”
And was this going out of bounds? What made you think we’d kill you, Laukkanen had asked. Not, what made you think we’d fuck you.
Before Laukkanen could prompt him again, he felt his shoulders square best as they could lying on his side. It was with an odd, quasi-accusatory defiance that he opened his mouth again and said, “I heard that under the fascists they have a lot of homosexuals.”
Though Gorky had written that in 1934, and five years later it would all be different with Germany and the fascist Hitlerites with their swastikas. He remembered, not long at all before it all became different with Germany, going to the cinema to see Eisenstein’s newest. He’d sat between Mikhail and Yulia in a packed house, watching Teutonic Knights falling through the ice. Mikhail hadn’t been sure which film he’d liked better, Eisenstein’s or Volga-Volga. Mikhail loved things he could shout laughter at, but he also adored the grand pageantry, the momentum of the music, the old battles on horseback with swords (and did that, too, have some further meaning?).
A few weeks later the film was nowhere to be found, and he knew better than to try very hard to find it. Around this time Mikhail had decided he preferred Volga-Volga. Aleksandr found it hard to think that Mikhail had decided only because of that, but he found it somewhat easier to think that after all, it was hard to find fault with what they said was Comrade Stalin’s favorite.
He didn’t pretend to understand how it all had come about. More outspoken people asked how it came about at Komsomol meetings, sometimes. Their elders never seemed quite sure how to answer, even as they answered.
“I don’t know about that,” said Laukkanen after another while, in a too-solemn voice, giving the impression that any moment the solemnity would detonate in a burst of more of his laughter. “It’s not as though we can get them to all come out and be totted up. They’d think it’s a cunning plan to get them all arrested. I know I’d think that. And from what I hear about Germany, if anything they had more homosexuals going about before the lot they have now came in. There was still a law like there is here, but in places like Berlin they didn’t much care about it anymore. That’s what my tribemates from around there have told me. As far as around here, I haven’t noticed nearly as much in the way of fascists, and there’s still that law about… but Toivo did tell me a silly story about Marshal Mannerheim. You know Mannerheim, right?”
“A little bit.” He wondered how many of the same things they knew.
“Well, Toivo told me quite a few silly stories about Mannerheim, actually, but in this one he’d brought a boy from the Urals, you know, back in the time of the tsars, to do his fetching and carrying. And the story goes that he was having sex with this boy. I’m not much in need or want of someone to fetch and carry, but I figure that if it’s good enough for Mannerheim it’s good enough for me.”
“Did he know?”
“He? Know what?”
“Järvinen. Did he know that you…”
Now Laukkanen did laugh, and even – while still lying down – threw his head back along the floor. “He certainly knew after that!”
“Oh.”
“And he was pretty embarrassed about it. He was trying to poke fun at Mannerheim, not at me.”
“Oh.”
***
Elias thought, turning the pieces around waiting for them to click in place. So he’d heard they tortured people, he’d heard they were chock full of homosexuals (and maybe surreptitiously they were, for all Elias knew, maybe there were far more than the few he’d bumped against fumbling in the dark, it wasn’t as if homosexuals ran around shouting it to the skies, and maybe a lot of them were like him and liked women well enough). Rape was one of those shitty Wyrm-soaked things people often did in wars, and since it involved fucking maybe Aleksandr figured a homosexual would be more likely to think of doing it to another man.
It seemed on a general level nobody liked the prospect of a man fucking around with other men, but they did like pointing at each other about it.
So it wasn’t all Elias giving him that idea. A good chunk of it was probably still him, to be sure, the dedication and so on, but not all of it. And he guessed it was the truth, not only because he wanted to believe it but because it had for once been volunteered. That was a small relief.
The talk of the mutilated bodies, though. The troops who’d done in that particular motti had been rushed to the Isthmus, no time to celebrate; it would be a while if ever before he could ask after that. His company hadn’t done anything quite like that, just dragged over and propped up a couple of the frozen-solid ones they’d found in the woods (not to mention the sentries with the cut throats, left where they’d not-fallen, the cold was that deep this winter), but maybe some other lot got more creative.
It was a good thing for them, though they’d never know it, that no one had ever crept up and cut Aleksandr’s throat in the night.
Someone had shot him, but at least that was at a distance, which gave them time to ski away; Crinos wasn’t quite optimal for moving in these snows. If Aleksandr had managed to catch the sniper while in frenzy, he probably would’ve taken note of the corpse when he came to. And if he’d been reluctant to mention he’d killed a Finn, the Warder – Ritva – still would have noticed. As far as the sniper himself, Delirium should have taken care of it.
Aleksandr said nothing else. Eventually, his breathing steadied. Elias lay close, maybe too close, and fell into the rhythm and fell into sleep after him.
***
Aleksandr woke with his face pressed into the blanket, damp around the eyes. He blinked and squeezed his eyes back shut, a few more stray tears slipping out, reaching after the dream he’d just had.
The encirclement again, he thought it had been. Malinovsky, Golubev, the usual. But then there was Mikhail, though Mikhail hadn’t been in his division, and Fyodor and Yulia, though Fyodor and Yulia were too young to be in the army at all and Yulia was a girl besides. Them and his mother and father and aunt and all four of his grandparents, and, and, and… He couldn’t remember what had happened to them all in his fast-dissolving dream – his nightmare. That was probably for the best.
But Princess Yelizaveta Volkovskaya had presided over everything. He was certain it was her, though when looking through her eyes in other dreams he hadn’t seen her face before. Garou symbols raced over her clothes in silver thread. Above her fur collar she was death-pale, moon-pale, her hair an almost equally pale blond in which silver and diamond and amber gleamed. The planes of her impassive face reminded him, logically enough, of Svetlana Volkovskaya. Her eyes were also a familiar blue – his eyes, Mikhail and Fyodor’s eyes, his mother’s eyes, but not his grandmother’s eyes and not, so he’d heard, his grandfather’s eyes.
And had this part of the dream, too, been some real echo, like the one of Princess Volkovskaya in Finland?
He couldn’t remember what she’d been doing in the dream but the inchoate idea still had his face pressed into the blanket, his shoulders twitching.
“Santeri?”
He twisted, looked up. Someone crouched over him and repeated, in a hoarse whisper, “Santeri?”
Aleksandr nodded. The man over him whispered something else in Finnish, which he didn’t quite grasp, and climbed his way over and out of the dugout. As Aleksandr watched him go out into the dark, reluctant to try to sleep again, Laukkanen whispered, “Aleksandr Sergeyevich? Are you all right?”
Out of some blend of fatigue and that odd defiance of last night, he didn’t want to lie right now. How could he really say no, though, when he was still in one piece? So Aleksandr said nothing.
“What did the Silver Fangs say to you?”
His voice came out too flat. “Not much I didn’t expect.”
“Oh. You see, they had to run for it out of Russia, so they’re especially bitter about Bolshevism and all of that. And it’s fine, really, not being one, didn’t I say, a lot of us aren’t –”
This repetition tripped some mechanism of his tongue he hadn’t known existed. “I wouldn’t want to be one even if they’d wanted me.”
Would he have said differently if it turned out they had wanted him? No – not in its essence, though probably he wouldn’t have said it aloud. He would’ve gone along, constantly hoping to get away and go home. And maybe if he got home there he might find other Garou, ones who didn’t talk that way, think that way; he might find a sort of pack he could blend into.
Even now, would they let him go home when the war was over?
The war had to be over, some day. They’d said at first it would be finished in time to be Stalin’s birthday present. Stalin’s birthday had come and gone, but still, eventually, with sheer numbers if nothing else… surely Finland couldn’t win.
He knew better than to say this to Laukkanen.
Maybe he’d already said too much because now there was a tautness in Laukkanen’s voice, an excessive patience slathered atop it, when he said, “Listen. I know being brought up by humans you learn certain things. I know being brought up in Russia now you learn more things. But what you have to understand now is that a lot of those things you learned are wrong.”
Next chapter here.
Fandom: Old World of Darkness (Werewolf: the Apocalypse)
Genre: Drama/Angst/Friendship
Rating: R
Word Count: ~9400
Summary: The year is 1940, and the death toll of the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union continues to mount. In the midst of this, a lost cub in the Red Army undergoes his First Change and finds himself at the mercy of Finnish Garou, contending with a destiny he doesn’t want.
Disclaimer: The Old World of Darkness and associated thingamabobbers aren’t mine.
Author’s Notes and Warnings: Finally managed to earmark some time to polish up another installment.
Contains violence and language, references to rape and torture, internalized homophobia and other values dissonance. On a lighter note, some bizarre but hopefully discreet shout-outs. Please note that the views of these characters certainly don’t always match my own.
Previous chapter here. First chapter here.
Chapter Five: Falcon and Cuckoo
The next time, Laukkanen started by saying he’d written to the Silver Fangs – strictly speaking, to one he was acquainted with, who would pass it on to his elders. Then, as Laukkanen had pledged, they entered the Umbra.
Aleksandr had wondered if alcohol might be involved – if in the end, after this one fantastic thing, the rest would be about as magical and inexplicable as an old-fashioned church service. Why wouldn’t werewolves be susceptible to religion? But when the door was latched Laukkanen brought out a small mirror (similar to the one they’d lent him at the sept to shave), and gave him instructions. After minutes of staring in the mirror (laid on the table – Laukkanen explained this was so it wouldn’t hit the floor when he vanished) and feeling his eyes go loose and unfocused and several times automatically stopping himself from what felt like some inner fall, almost like falling asleep – Laukkanen, apparently knowing each time it happened, making noises of reassurance – he finally plunged headlong.
“Like it?” Laukkanen eventually asked him from behind him. Aleksandr wondered if it was imagination that he sounded so smug about it. While he hadn’t proclaimed skepticism, neither had he put up a pretense of enthusiasm for the idea.
Enthusiasm still wasn’t forthcoming, though blank frozen shock now steadily ebbed. Had he seen a place like this in some dream he hadn’t quite remembered? It seemed altogether like a dream-place – vague and misted. But there was the moon. The pine trees loomed over them. No walls or ceiling to block them out. No dugouts, no other people, only various somethings flitting here and there.
“The Penumbra,” Laukkanen announced. Aleksandr turned and saw him driving something several centimeters deep into what passed for ground. A rag knotted at the top of a branch – a makeshift flag. “I’ll try not to take too long, and remind me to check back. If something comes up and they figure out you’re not there in that world, it might be awkward. I’m leaving this so we know where to step back – the house doesn’t exist here, you see. Too new. It might start echoing in a few more years. Now,” and he pointed, “have a look at that Gaffling.”
***
Nobody attacked and nobody barged in on Jokela, so they stepped out of the Penumbra at the end of the lesson without incident. Aleksandr looking lost wasn’t exactly infrequent, but he was so evidently distracted by this new revelation that Elias decided that was enough teaching for the night. That wasn’t too bad – he needed to pay more attention to his other fellows, anyway. He hadn’t made sergeant for nothing.
With the others there was a little more teasing about Aleksandr, even one joke that there’d be a wedding in Jokela’s office any day now (if they actually knew the half of it, Elias told himself, they’d likely be more vicious, because maybe some would be secretly all right with men fucking men and others all right with fucking Russians, but both? “I wouldn’t marry him any more than I’d marry Alex,” he told the joker. This was true), but either they accepted it or, after his reprimand to Nieminen, they knew to hide their lack of acceptance.
And many of them grew more accepting of Aleksandr with each day and night, he thought, trying to observe demeanors with all the vigilance he hadn’t displayed in the fiasco of a first day. In fact a number, starting with Corporal Salo, seemed almost to adopt him. If Elias was supposedly taking him in as a surrogate kid cousin, they served as the rest of the sprawling extended family – an assortment of gruff uncles and older cousins (always older cousins, despite the actual relativities of some of the birthdays). Aleksandr’s Finnish was more than broken – it was shattered, pulverized even, but he made an effort to use it, and this endeared him further to this group; some even took it upon themselves to teach him more in their spare time. One word they taught him was Santeri, short for Aleksanteri, the Finnish form of his name; in this way they rebaptized him (if he’d ever been baptized to begin with; there certainly wasn’t the residue of a Kin-Fetch’s kiss in evidence). Aleksandr collected vocabulary and cigarettes, had no trouble getting razor blades for shaving and light-ups for the cigarettes; he remained lanky, but he was eating more and it showed.
A few days in, Elias started to see him smiling. Not at him, and they were nervous smiles, still, as he said “Thank you” and so on, but they were a pleasant surprise, maybe even gratifying, except in the grand scheme how much had he done to bring them on? This was underlined when he mentioned it to Jokela. “I wasn’t sure he could smile,” he said.
“He could,” said Jokela. “He did on the first night, but you weren’t there at the time.”
“When was that?”
“After I checked his ankle.”
After Jokela healed his ankle, he meant (this being in his office with an open door), and Elias told himself it was ridiculous to be so disappointed about it.
***
Aleksandr smoked more often now. Before, when tobacco happened to come into his possession, there was always someone who wanted it more than he did, so he kept giving it to Mikhail or otherwise trading it away for something more appealing (did this count as speculation, he wondered when he was especially nervous). But now some of the Finns plied him with cigarettes which he found he preferred to the ones at home, and there wasn’t anyone to pass them to, so he occasionally indulged himself; the stock in his pockets continued to grow.
He was smoking outside, Salo beside him, when he saw a group of Finns entering the camp in triumph with a well-fed horse hauling a sled. The sled was painted white and piled high with supplies, and when it came closer he saw the boxes and cans and barrels were labeled in Russian. Meat, beans, tea, soup powder, bread, butter. Spoils from another destroyed encirclement? They dragged all this to the field kitchen as Aleksandr stared after them, the cigarette burning down in his hand until Salo said “Santeri!” in warning.
Later that night Laukkanen explained, with some embarrassment (at least there was that), that they intercepted messages and faked aerial signals so that the planes dropping food into the encirclements dropped it on the Finns instead. “Sometimes they get wise and drop Molotov’s sort of bread,” Laukkanen said, by which he meant bombs (for some reason Molotov the foreign minister, not Stalin or even Voroshilov as he might have supposed, was the symbolic target of their ire, and Aleksandr turned over the idea of asking about the reasoning behind that), “so we don’t put the signal too close.”
That was a reminder, the way the occasional faint sounds that carried from the nearest encirclement were a smaller reminder. For a little while he didn’t want to eat. Not when he thought of gaunt faces turned up to the sky. But not eating wouldn’t somehow feed them, only leave more for the Finns, and maybe it was something that someone like the intended recipients would have it. He wasn’t sure how much of this decision was swayed by not wanting to stop eating, but he had his self-suspicions.
***
Elias continued the lessons, whatever he could think of. These nights he only called on Jokela when absolute privacy was necessary; otherwise, the dugout or the front room served, voices low in case some of the others understood more Russian than they let on. The sauna might have served as well, but the thought of the last time they’d shared it made him reluctant to suggest it again, because even if he meant nothing by it he still wasn’t sure how Aleksandr would hear it. He drilled Aleksandr on the Litany, had him keep practice shifting, took him on several more jaunts into the Penumbra. Garou glyphs, on the side, and acquainting him with the simple language of wolves that Garou understood by instinct. A review of the thirteen tribes – he didn’t go very far into the Silver Fangs because the Silver Fangs themselves could do it better. So more about the Get of Fenris, then the Children of Gaia, the Shadow Lords, the Glass Walkers, the Bone Gnawers –
“Ha,” he said. “The Bone Gnawers. Well.”
This time Aleksandr went so far as to prompt. “What about them?”
“Twenty-five years ago I’d tell you that the thing about the Bone Gnawers is they’re all as poor as mud. If there’s a crack, they’ll fall through it. They live in the countryside and the city, and they’re lucky if they can keep hold of a shack. Mostly, it’s the gutter, in places that have a gutter. But at least all that time in the gutter means they’ve got a tendency to be tough. They’re good at keeping alive, at least.”
“Twenty-five years ago?”
“Right. Or, let’s see, twenty-three, to cut it close. I’m sure you’ve learned in school –” Aleksandr looked like he grasped what Elias was getting at. “– about how you had the Bolsheviks and so on. Well, as far as I know, it seems it took the fancy of a lot of the Russian Bone Gnawers.” A lot of the Finnish ones, too… he thought inevitably of Toivo, and winced. “They thought it was a good chance at clawing their way out of the gutter. I don’t suppose you have any idea how well that’s working out for them.”
“I don’t.”
“Ah well. And out here, some are still trying. I know a Ragabash – Toivo Järvinen – who managed to get an apartment in Tampere, and has a job that pays the rent. That’s his way of showing his Ragabash contrariness, he says – being settled in a proper home with Tyyne and Anja. That’s his wife and little girl, by the way. But then he’s concentrated so hard on getting himself settled, and on keeping himself settled, that he’s not paying as much attention as he might to Garou matters. He’s a fostern, and he looks like he’ll be one for a long while even as Bone Gnawers go. I’ve asked him if it’s really worth the effort, and he’s told me to do charach with myself. Charach,” he explained, “is the term for when Garou mates with Garou. But he’s decent when you get him to take a look outside his door. And he does some great drawings when he has the money for it.”
As he was taking the pictures from his sleeve and spreading them out by way of edification, he saw that has-questions-but-forget-about-hearing-them look. Elias had not, as of yet, hit on a reliable method to induce him to forget about forgetting about it.
He kept trying. “You look like you have something to say about it.”
This time he got lucky and Aleksandr said more than a token little thing about it. “I was wondering. Is he…?”
“Yes?” Elias said after a few seconds of trying to figure out whether that would prompt him or cut him off this time.
“You said he’s trying to have a life like the ones at home tried. Is he also a… is he…?”
Well, it wasn’t as if Elias had tried particularly hard to hide it. Maybe some part of him had put it out there for Aleksandr to piece it together. “I think he votes Social Democrat, actually. Not all the way…” He flapped his left hand. “… but in the general direction, yes.”
“Oh.” And he still had that look, but Elias had no more luck getting more out of him.
***
Aleksandr reached, and reached, and one night he had a catch larger than usual. He dreamed of someone he was fairly sure was the woman on the horse he’d been reaching for. This time someone else said a name, and she turned toward it. This startled him so much that the whole thing nearly broke apart before he could get hold of the name.
When he woke up he scrambled after that dream, dragged it back up, kept his eyes closed as he mouthed it over and over, anchoring in reality.
***
Then the Silent Striders, the Black Furies, the Fianna, the Stargazers, the Red Talons, the Uktena and Wendigo. Finally, the Black Spiral Dancers – “They don’t show their faces around here often, but when they do we kick them in straightaway.”
After that he started on a brief history of the Garou – Aleksandr’s eyes got big and he got that look again when they reached the period of the Impergium, and this time he kept his mouth well shut. Elias wondered for a bit if he should’ve saved that particular era for later, but that was getting ridiculous – the cub would have to find out eventually. And he was pretty sure his eyes had popped, too, when he’d first heard about it, and he remembered Marita’s exclamations from beside him, so he repeated what Jalmari and Answers-Storm had told them about how they had put a stop to the Impergium in the end, and for damn good reason. He had no idea what good it did in this case.
This happened all over again when they got to the War of Rage – Aleksandr’s big eyes, Elias’s don’t-worry-never-again-and-hey-there’s-still-the-Corax – but at least there didn’t seem to be quite the same visceral horror. Aleksandr knew humans; he’d never have known a Gurahl.
And night after night he went sniping at the motti, went raiding with the others, dreamed of switching to kicking in Black Spiral Dancers’ ugly mugs.
And one of those nights, he heard someone else’s howls. Still at considerable distance – better too far, they’d figure, than too close. He howled back. Here, we’re here.
After he got back, he told this to Aleksandr. “We’ll be expecting them soon.”
He wasn’t sure it was a very accurate comparison, but the color of Aleksandr’s face put him in mind of spoiled milk. Maybe he was only interpreting it around its expression. “Oh.”
They don’t bite, he almost said, but that wasn’t, strictly speaking, true. He settled for, “I don’t think they’ll bite you.”
“How should I… behave?”
“Well, you’re a cub, and a lost one at that, so they won’t expect you to have the protocol memorized. Just remember your rhyas and follow my lead.” His color didn’t much improve. “Are you worried about anything specific?”
He was about to write it off as another forget-about-asking when Aleksandr said, in a rush (when he spoke beyond the simplest sentences it seemed always headlong rushing or constant hesitation or both), “I know you said I’m one of them, I know, but I don’t know about them, how they do things, if I’ll say something like… Leningrad, and they’ll be… be…”
Elias waited to be sure he wouldn’t finish the sentence, then cogitated further while he was at it. “They know how things are in Russia now,” he said once done cogitating, “and vaunted alphas that they are they’d be idiots not to take that into account. But, much as I’d still like you to understand I won’t take you out and shoot you for saying something I don’t like, I expect you can’t go so wrong just with how you are. It’s not as though you normally go about raving about, what’s it called, Soviet power and so on, do you? You’ll be all right. All right?”
“All right,” Aleksandr lied blatantly, but besides what reassurances he could think of Elias couldn’t do anything about it, as per usual.
Instead he kept on teaching Aleksandr the glyphs, drawing on scraps of paper he’d feed into the fire afterward. The forms, the auspices. The Silver Fangs’ pawful of claws or set of sharp teeth, the Get of Fenris’s wolf-born-of-wolf. Aleksandr particularly stared at that one. “We had it first,” Elias told him.
He took a little time to go back into the Penumbra and replace the crude flag he’d planted at the house. This time the branch was one he sawed off one of the spirit-shadows of trees on this side, with all due respects paid to the spirits involved. This one was larger, more visible from a distance – though admittedly, with all the trees around this didn’t do much.
The next night they were closer. Not quite the formal Howl of Introduction, but establishing: We’re here. Where are you? And we are – two homid Galliards of the Silver Fangs, he gathered from their intonations. Not, then, the one he’d addressed the talen to – Kirill Belyev, who was a Theurge.
That night, coming back from his patrol, Elias gave notice to Kustaa before taking lupus and howling back. Then it was back and forth, Kustaa skiing along behind him, until he met the two silvery wolves between the trees.
One after another, they slipped back into homid. The Silver Fangs turned out to be a man and woman – tall, sturdy, and with that same look gleaming in the moonlight, the moonlight which also gleamed on metal at hands and throat. A dedicated bag hung over the woman’s shoulder. Elias thought himself back into formalities and greeted them with all the due ceremony to be had. In turn, they introduced themselves in full form: Filipp Gennadyevich Zvezdin and Svetlana Konstantinovna Volkovskaya.
“Where is the cub?” asked Volkovskaya.
“He awaits you at camp. If you would prefer, I can direct you through the Penumbra.”
They very much preferred this and so, throwing in a few apologies all around, Elias shucked his skis and rifle (you’d have to be a Glass Walker and hence default urrah not to be chewed out for dedicating a Weaver-thing like that), lent them his mirror to step sideways, and showed them to his marker. He’d been through the forest enough times in the past weeks that even in the Penumbra finding his way back wasn’t too difficult.
“We would like to know,” said Zvezdin, “the circumstances in which you discovered this cub.”
He retold the story as they walked: the howling, the Warder’s discovery, the mutual lack of comprehension, the dispatch to the camp. Volkovskaya said the same thing he’d thought: “It would have made matters simpler if Cuts-Down-The-Wyrm had notified us while the cub was at the sept.”
“I am afraid he did not see fit to inform me of his reasoning. However, he did grant me leave to use my own discretion in this matter, so once I had determined that he was a cub, I believed I should contact his tribemates.”
“I see. How old is he?”
“Nineteen.”
“Fairly old for the First Change,” said Zvezdin, “but not impossible. I understand that Cuts-Down-The-Wyrm may have wished to verify his status, but in matters pertaining to our tribe he should have left this to us to determine. No Kin-Fetch attended him?”
“None that we saw, and we found no baptismal mark.”
“Hm. He was with the Red Army, you said?”
“Yes, he was a conscript.”
“Hm.”
“You said in your message,” said Volkovskaya, “that you believed an ancestor of his had visited the sept?”
“Yes. I believe a dream of his ancestor helped lead him there.” And he recounted Aleksandr’s dream of the rider in the forest. Volkovskaya made noises of vague affirmation.
The brief journey passed even faster with questions of this kind. Once at the marker, he peered through the Gauntlet to be sure no mischievous spirit had relocated it. Then he left them, with a few more apologies (couldn’t go wrong with those) and found his way back to Kustaa, who’d kicked himself out of his skis and now paced impatient circles in the snow. There, he apologized again and slipped back into his gear, and they set off for camp together.
Aleksandr, awake when they entered the dugout, was promptly on his feet, leaving the hat behind atop the book of Tolstoy. A hurried stroll to the house followed, Elias wondering if, with his spoiled-milk complexion, Aleksandr might even be in so bad a way as to spew his dinner on the pair. The image was funny, but for Aleksandr’s sake he hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
“We’ll meet them in the Penumbra,” said Elias as he latched the door. “That way if anyone’s eavesdropping they won’t hear two extra people.” He turned and got out the mirror again. “I’ll keep watch through the Gauntlet to be sure nothing’s going on back here, and to know if we have to step back through. I’ll come up now and again, in case you need me to say something, but I’ve already told them about everything that only I could tell them. Will you be all right on your own?” The next second he realized it was a stupid question. If he thought he wouldn’t be all right, and odds were this was what he was thinking, there wasn’t much Elias could do about it.
Whatever he thought, though, what Aleksandr said, back stiff, was “Yes.”
Elias turned and thanked Jokela, who looked up from his hasty setup and nodded at them. They’d worked out signals – sound might not get through intact, but if, say, he stood his Russian dictionary in a certain position on the desk, that meant they had to get back through immediately before someone had to be let in to see they’d vanished. Also, he saw, Jokela had the forethought to lay out a half-finished game of cards for them to snatch up – the kind of game where speaking wasn’t necessary. To be certain, Elias spent another two minutes teaching Aleksandr the basics in case they were called upon to continue play. Then, after a last look around, Elias held out the mirror.
On the other side, Luna’s hazy light came through clearest in the piece of Penumbra containing shadows of neither house nor trees. In his absence the Silver Fangs had lit a lantern, which Volkovskaya had set down before her as she consulted some massive leather-bound tome; hence, he had an even better view of them. He pegged Zvezdin as having maybe a decade on Cuts-Down-The-Wyrm; Volkovskaya, meanwhile, he guessed at around her thirties.
More introductions, with all the pomp Elias could call up without feeling like a complete windbag. When he gave Volkovskaya’s name, it was sheer happenstance that Aleksandr’s soft gasp fit in the space between words. Volkovskaya raised an eyebrow but nodded to Elias to continue.
And he continued, up to – “Honored elders, I present Aleksandr Sergeyevich Novikov, a cub of your blood. Now, if you will pray excuse me?”
“Yes, go on,” said Zvezdin. “Now, child, let us have a closer look at you.”
The way Aleksandr stumbled toward them, one would think his ankle was still twisted. Elias withdrew, staying close enough to keep a view of the room on the other side of the Gauntlet; as he tried to concentrate on that view, he heard Volkovskaya say, “You have heard the name?”
Aleksandr replied, “Yes.”
“Where was this?”
“I’ve heard it before, I think, but the last time I heard it was in a dream. Princess Yelizaveta Yuriyevna Volkovskaya?”
***
The Volkovskaya in front of him looked briefly and pleasantly surprised, and nodded. “Yes. That sounds correct. When did you have such a dream?”
“A few nights ago.” More had come after.
“Hunts-With-Mielikki tells me that earlier you dreamed of a woman paying a visit to the Finnish Garou. Was this the same woman?”
“I think so. I also heard Kanyukova.”
“And Hunts-With-Mielikki did not mention the name to you prior?”
“No.”
“You never heard this specific name before?”
“I don’t remember hearing it before.”
“That very nearly confirms it. After his account of this potential vision, we examined our tribal records for possible candidates.” Pages rustled as she consulted her book. “Princess Volkovskaya is my ancestor, and her Garou name was Yelizaveta Kanyukova – this was also her human name before she married Prince Volkovsky. She paid a visit to the Sept of Silent Birds in the year 1810, to mark the transition of the protectorate from House Gleaming Eye to Clan Crescent Moon. It is highly likely that you share blood with her, and therefore with me. Now, cousin, if you would allow me…”
She put the book under her arm, picked up the lantern, and took a few steps closer. Aleksandr kept still as she scrutinized him, holding the lantern close – “Chin up, if you would” – and turned to the old man, Zvezdin. “He has the Volkovsky look, does he not?”
Now it was Zvezdin’s turn to step closer while Volkovskaya went to the side and gave him the lantern. Aleksandr tried even harder not to look away, not to squirm. He imagined suddenly that this, too, might be a bad dream or worse; he uprooted these ideas as fast as he could, because if all this had been delusion there was no help for him. Behind Zvezdin he could just see Laukkanen, facing away, stock-still, and tried not to make it too obvious that he kept looking at that because, as with Ilmari Cuts-Down-The-Wyrm, it was especially hard to look back into Zvezdin’s eyes for too long.
At last Zvezdin stepped back, proclaiming as he returned the lantern, “There is a resemblance, especially in the face. As a matter of fact, Svetlana Konstantinovna, I would say that his look is particularly reminiscent of your father, though the personality is evidently quite different.”
Aleksandr thought, in unspoken reply, of his mother. It was a bit embarrassing to say a boy got his face from his mother, but for the most part that had been the case for him as well as for his brothers. They shared much of the same bone structure, and the same eyes. Their hair was their father’s, and Aleksandr and Mikhail had also inherited his lanky body, though their height came from both parents.
He put it together, chain links: If he looked like this Konstantin Volkovsky and he also looked like his mother, then his mother –
– and there had been the denunciation, no matter what hadn’t come of it –
– but that was, that was…
“But Father stayed behind alone. Not even Mother remained with him. Do you think perhaps he…?”
“I had the acquaintance of Konstantin Anatolyevich from boyhood, and that does not seem at all unlikely.”
None of the relatives Aleksandr knew of had that name and patronymic; then again, he didn’t know of many. His father was Sergey Mikhailovich, and his grandfathers had been Mikhail Trofimovich Novikov and Aleksandr Kuzmich Smirnov. This didn’t reassure him much, not when he knew that a former would have definite motive to lie about it, and motive not to pass on the secret when the walls were so thin.
And not when he knew what Laukkanen had said, those nights ago, though he still couldn’t imagine his mother or grandmother doing anything of the kind.
Zvezdin had turned to him again. “Now then, cub, can you assume lupus form?”
He could, and once he did so there followed another two rounds of scrutiny with the lantern, punctuated by further instructions to lift his head and so on. Zvezdin murmured various things he didn’t quite comprehend; Volkovskaya listened to Zvezdin and murmured acknowledgment and occasional reply.
For example, “Hm. Quite extensive streaking. Unusual given his ancestry. For all his wild ways, your father was extremely well-bred.”
“Perhaps his mate was not quite as well-bred?”
“Likely so.”
Aleksandr wondered if the blood going to his face might show through the wolf’s fur.
Eventually this, too, ended. “I would like to ask you some questions,” Zvezdin told him.
Aleksandr understood – he dropped lupus and fell into his normal shape in that easy way, much easier than working the opposite direction. He stood and pushed himself into meeting Zvezdin’s eye.
Zvezdin began, “Might you have heard the name Volkovsky mentioned among your family?”
“Once, that I remember.” He picked it up outside his family, too, in passing – one of the prominent families before the Revolution. “My mother’s family used to live in Zimovo, and my grandmother said they came riding by a lot.”
“Zimovo village?”
“Yes.”
“What was your grandmother’s name? The one she used, at any rate.”
“Praskovya Gerasimovna Smirnova – when she was married. Kharitonova, before that.”
“Your grandfather?”
Aleksandr gradually recounted both sets of grandparents; Volkovskaya consulted her book and Zvezdin frowned. “None of those names match those of any of our Kinfolk families. Are you absolutely certain that they are not assumed?”
“No, but if they are I don’t know about it.”
“Now, on your father’s side – what were your grandparents’ occupations?”
The answer came quite easily, as thing to be ideologically proud of tended to. “My grandfather worked in a factory and my grandmother worked in a bakery.”
“Did they?”
“That’s what my father said.”
“And what were they on your mother’s side?”
“Peasants.” When they looked like they didn’t think they heard it right he repeated, quickly, “They were peasants.” And there was nothing wrong with that. It wasn’t as if they’d been rich peasants, kulaks, as if they’d ever lived at the expense of anyone else, which was more than could be said for the Volkovskys and almost certainly the Zvezdins. He had no reason to be ashamed. But Zvezdin and Volkovskaya, staring at him, made him feel as though he should be.
Volkovskaya said, very slowly and gently, “Cousin, please understand that you are among allies now. We are aware that our tribemates still in Russia are ill-treated and dispossessed by the humans in power, and they have good reason to keep silent as to their proper status for much the same reason as the Veil must be upheld. But there is no need to conceal anything of the kind from us.”
He looked at her; she looked back. He looked at Laukkanen, still standing there. Laukkanen had told him that if you looked back to the other side like that you couldn’t pay attention to the side you were on, that the only thing that could snap you out of it was pain, was wounds.
He looked back to her and said, about as slowly, “Once someone said my mother was –” He bit his tongue on “former,” imagined it would grate on their ears like “Leningrad.” “– was a noble, in disguise. They looked into her background. But they didn’t find anything that wasn’t as she said it was, and I think if there was anything…”
“Ah,” said Volkovskaya. “Obviously, there is something.”
Now there was no fur to cover his embarrassment. “I know. I’m sorry.”
But still, they were so thorough. Especially then; it hadn’t been long after Kirov’s murder and everyone was on the lookout.
“Your face doesn’t lie, cousin, and there must have been a reason for someone to say such a thing. Perhaps your past was so well-concealed as to escape their knowledge, but your look was the reason – perhaps some disgruntled Red Bone Gnawer recognized her for what she was, even if it was unable to convince its human accomplices. Do you resemble your mother, do you think?”
“Yes, besides, um…”
Zvezdin’s frown was very deep now. “I am afraid I am not as optimistic as you, Svetlana Konstantinovna.”
“How do you mean, Filipp Gennadyevich-rhya?”
“Consider all the circumstances. Consider that he does not bear the mark of the Baptism of Fire, and that the Volkovsky Kin-Fetch did not visit the Sept of Silent Birds. Consider that he knew nothing of his heritage – consider that he himself admits he has no inkling of nobility in his ancestry. Consider that though he may share blood with Yelizaveta Yuriyevna Kanyukova, and with the ancient line of the Volkovskys, the manifestation of this is unduly marred in comparison to your own or your father’s – it is an imprecise science, to be sure, but I highly doubt that a mate from within the tribe could have brought his breeding so low in one generation. Consider, finally, the habits of your father, by far the most viable candidate. Consider his profligate ways before the rise of Bolshevism, and the likelihood that at some point this profligacy produced at least one bastard.”
In the normal course of things, Aleksandr was quite used to people talking in front of him but not to him. It wasn’t as though he particularly minded that in itself; it would be silly to mind, given that he avoided attention best as he could. But here, listening to Zvezdin talk about breeding – here, now, he was angry. He wanted to shout, howl, mark his existence.
He’d wanted to shout before, or just to speak when it came to some things. And as he had before, he kept his mouth closed.
Now they whispered together. He couldn’t hear them, and didn’t try very hard to.
Laukkanen turned around.
***
Elias took them in – the Galliards having a private conference, and behind them Aleksandr standing with clenched hands and lips pressed together tight – and wondered what he’d missed; his eavesdropping tendencies, discontented, wanted to have their fill now, but he shoved them down. “Pray excuse me. I hope matters are proceeding well?” he said, for courtesy’s sake, though Aleksandr at least didn’t seem to think so.
Zvezdin turned toward him. “They proceed fairly well. We would speak with you in a short while.”
Elias decided this meant he shouldn’t look through again. So he stood and watched as they finished up their whispering and turned toward him again.
“Elias Hunts-With-Mielikki,” began Zvezdin, “we thank you for bringing our attention to this matter. However, at this time it is our judgment that while the cub is clearly of Silver Fang stock, it is far less likely that he is suitable for the tribe proper.”
“Ah. That is… unfortunate.” Elias wondered briefly and wildly if in his nervousness Aleksandr had started raving about Soviet power.
“The circumstantial evidence suggests he is some natural descendant of the Volkovskys, born of the Ragabash Prince Konstantin Volkovsky’s mingling with commoners. Even if he were of impeccable lineage, which I must doubt given his own testimony, there is the indisputable and troubling fact that he has grown to this age taught nothing of his heritage and responsibilities. An improper upbringing leads to an improper attitude toward the responsibilities of rule.” His tone softened slightly. “We do not fault you for notifying us. We cannot expect those of other tribes to discern such subtleties.”
***
After the formal leave-takings, Aleksandr and Laukkanen stepped back into the house. Jokela nodded at them from the table and thanked Aleksandr when he cleared up the game of cards. They left immediately after.
“Well,” Laukkanen whispered to him halfway to the dugout, “I hope I didn’t get your hopes too high.”
“Oh no, you didn’t,” Aleksandr whispered back. He hadn’t had any hopes of that kind to be dashed; what he felt, instead, was an incredible relief. It couldn’t have been true, and it wasn’t true. He couldn’t possibly be a leader, and he wasn’t one.
Then again, rage continued to simmer at the back of his head. He was relieved, yes, that the Silver Fangs weren’t going to haul him into all of that, but in the opposite direction he was still indignant that they had rejected him. Rejected him like that. If it had only been a matter of him being unsuitable, he would’ve had no problem because it would be true, but it wasn’t just him, it was his whole family they’d brushed off – even Mikhail, the natural leader – and in a larger way all the people of their class. All that about commoners and lineage and bastards. They hadn’t sneered about it, but they were pitying, condescending, and in a way that was worse. With sneering he could fortify himself with a pure fury at them even if he never showed it, assure himself with vigor that this was the enemy he’d already learned about, tell himself not to be taken in.
And then again, Zvezdin had said clearly of Silver Fang stock, and that meant that still, at some point, something was…
His mother, no, it would be his grandmother…
Volkovskaya had still called him cousin, with that pitying look on her face.
Laukkanen went on as if he’d said yes. “It’s not so bad, not being a Silver Fang. Take me, for instance – I’m no Silver Fang. Though then again,” he continued, contemplatively, “I’m not sure you’re exactly Fenrir material. Though that’s not so bad either. A lot of Garou, actually, aren’t Fenrir material.”
And Laukkanen had been the one to tell him about the Bone Gnawers who lived in the gutter under the press of capitalism, then talk about one who’d escaped it with an air of disapproval, damning with faint praise. He seemed to think “Garou matters,” being another soldier in some endless war of spirits, ought to be altogether more important than this Järvinen feeding his daughter.
After all, he was a White. He might not be constantly shoving it into Aleksandr’s face, might not be torturing him like Malinovsky had said the Whites would (but Aleksandr was also Garou, and for a while Laukkanen had thought he was some secret prince of Garou atop that; would he have looked after an ordinary human in nearly the same way?), but it was still there, like the encirclements – he couldn’t see them from camp but he could hear sometimes, and imagine them.
“I mean, if all Garou had to be Fenrir or nothing, there’d be a whole lot less Garou in the world today, and we have enough trouble keeping our numbers up as it is…”
They ducked into the dugout. He whispered, “Laukkanen?”
“Yes?”
“Could I ask…?”
“Of course!”
“What tribe do you think I’ll be in, then?”
“Well, let’s see… I’d have a better idea if you spoke up more often, but…”
“I’m sorry.”
“There’s no need for that.” They shucked off their boots and leaned side-by-side against the wall in the dark, at a short distance from the huddle of sleeping bodies, blankets pulled up to their necks, heads turned toward one another. Laukkanen considered. “Right now, just roughly mind you, I’d say the Children of Gaia.”
He remembered what Laukkanen had said about them, when teaching him about the tribes. Some might say they’re too soft, but I figure they didn’t get to thriving up here shoulder-to-shoulder with us by being nothing but soft. You definitely don’t flop your way through a klaive duel with a Koskinen. It comes from how they try to smooth things out with everyone, get us all working together against the Wyrm, and to get hold of all of us they’re easier on the weakest of us. Sometimes they’re too easy, but that’s sometimes.
Laukkanen said now, “I suppose part of it’s actually how quiet you are. I guess some of that you chalk up to, you know, the situation, but are you, usually?”
“Yes, usually.” Always, he was tempted to say.
“Yes, well, not all Children of Gaia are quiet, definitely not all of them, but a lot of them are…” He gestured, abbreviated and vague. “… accommodating, like that.” By which he meant pliant, by which he meant weak? “Of course we’re all fighters, but some of us keep up the fight dawn to dusk to dawn and some of us don’t. Though I figure, just because you’d rather not, let’s say, smash liquor bottles over people’s heads every night doesn’t mean you can’t be brave where it really matters, against the Wyrm. Look at the captain – he’s Kinfolk, but it still holds for him. And as far as being brave…”
Laukkanen said nothing else for such a long time that Aleksandr thought that maybe he was meant to finish the sentence for himself, that it was self-evident (to Laukkanen). He looked away. The closest of the sleeping men muttered something and rolled onto his stomach, his arm flung out over Aleksandr’s feet.
“As far as being brave,” Laukkanen repeated at last, “there’s different varieties of bravery. Some you can see easier than others. Do you remember when you turned around, fought back, and nearly wounded me with my own puukko?”
After another pause to see if it was rhetorical, “Yes.”
“Now that was brave of you. That would be one variety, one of the easier ones. But do you remember when… the time in the sauna?”
He swallowed. “Yes.”
“I suppose a lot of people wouldn’t call it brave, and it’s not exactly glorious battle, but I think, yes, what you did in there… I mean to say, I think you were brave to say what you did.”
Aleksandr turned his head to face him again.
“I mean to say, when you thought you were going to die and you thought I would… when you said those things about how you would… when you told me how you would cooperate, and how for this you asked me not to spare your life but to spare your family trouble from it.” Laukkanen’s Russian had slipped into the cadence of the first two days. “In my opinion, it was brave of you there, as well, to willingly give up something of that sort.”
Brave? If he’d thought that using his mouth on Laukkanen in the French way would have saved his life, he probably would have done it to save his life, and surely Laukkanen wouldn’t call that brave. But as it was, as it had seemed, why ask for something so obviously out of reach? And even the kind of bravery Laukkanen thought was easy to pick out – if surviving was next to impossible, a quick death fighting was better than a slow one under the hands of torturers. He thought all this rather distantly – he was at a remove from his sick fear and resignation on that night, and was fairly certain now that it wouldn’t happen, not that way.
“I have given this some consideration, and if I were in such a situation as you feared you were in, I am not at all certain that I could do such a thing. But that is how I am. Generally speaking, my tribe swears by one sort of bravery. A number of my tribemates would disagree when I call you brave for such a thing – though those tribemates are not here and I am, so you may disregard their opinion. But when I think of that sort of bravery – that quiet sort – I associate it with the Children of Gaia. I can far more easily imagine one of them doing such a thing, though admittedly this is perhaps because I am not as well acquainted with them as with my fellow Fenrir. Yes. In my opinion, I believe you would do well with them.”
“Oh,” he said, to say something. Then he thought of something proper to say. “Thank you.”
“You are welcome.”
The next silence went on so long that by the end of it, Aleksandr had slid onto the floor of the dugout, wrapped in the blanket. He’d carefully moved the sleeping man’s outstretched hand out of the way, and now he looked at its shape – this close, in the dark, it didn’t look like a hand anymore. Laukkanen had joined him, and that seemed to be the end of it for the night, but then Laukkanen whispered again, behind him, “I have also been curious about a related matter.”
Aleksandr rolled back over, narrowly avoiding both Laukkanen and the hand. “Yes?”
“How did you come to believe that you would die? No. How did you come to believe that we would kill you?”
How, Aleksandr asked himself on the heels of that, blinking at what he could make out of Laukkanen’s face, was he supposed to reply?
It was his own turn to cogitate. He, too, stretched it out, mostly with mental circlings, until Laukkanen said, very gently, “There is no need to answer if you do not wish to.”
“No,” said Aleksandr. “I mean. I can answer.” Could there be any harm in telling him this? Some strategic value he was overlooking? Would Laukkanen take offense at hearing exactly what he’d asked for?
“I heard… I heard the Whites tortured people. That you… that they’d been doing it to their prisoners all the way back in the time of the revolution. In the fighting between the Whites and the Reds. ”
“The revolution…?” Laukkanen exhaled, a long lingering sigh. “Ah. The civil war. I see. Who told you?”
“Different places. I don’t remember every one exactly. Some of it was in the newspaper. The radio. Komsomol meetings. People talked about it. Politruk Malinovsky talked about it.”
“Go on.”
“And you… and they were leaving bodies, outside of camp. Other people found them and said there were… were pieces, missing.”
This exhalation came out half a whistle. Astonished, maybe, incredulous. “Maybe the wolves were at them. Regular wolves. We don’t eat humans, but our Kin don’t always pay attention to that.”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see. But everyone was talking about them. They said –”
Some of them, pants at their ankles and cocks chopped –
“– they said, some of the men were… they had their… they were… they’d been undressed. Castrated.” And could regular wolves undo buttons and pull down drawers, he didn’t need to say.
Another whistling exhalation.
“And… I didn’t hear so much about it, but I did hear…”
And was this going out of bounds? What made you think we’d kill you, Laukkanen had asked. Not, what made you think we’d fuck you.
Before Laukkanen could prompt him again, he felt his shoulders square best as they could lying on his side. It was with an odd, quasi-accusatory defiance that he opened his mouth again and said, “I heard that under the fascists they have a lot of homosexuals.”
Though Gorky had written that in 1934, and five years later it would all be different with Germany and the fascist Hitlerites with their swastikas. He remembered, not long at all before it all became different with Germany, going to the cinema to see Eisenstein’s newest. He’d sat between Mikhail and Yulia in a packed house, watching Teutonic Knights falling through the ice. Mikhail hadn’t been sure which film he’d liked better, Eisenstein’s or Volga-Volga. Mikhail loved things he could shout laughter at, but he also adored the grand pageantry, the momentum of the music, the old battles on horseback with swords (and did that, too, have some further meaning?).
A few weeks later the film was nowhere to be found, and he knew better than to try very hard to find it. Around this time Mikhail had decided he preferred Volga-Volga. Aleksandr found it hard to think that Mikhail had decided only because of that, but he found it somewhat easier to think that after all, it was hard to find fault with what they said was Comrade Stalin’s favorite.
He didn’t pretend to understand how it all had come about. More outspoken people asked how it came about at Komsomol meetings, sometimes. Their elders never seemed quite sure how to answer, even as they answered.
“I don’t know about that,” said Laukkanen after another while, in a too-solemn voice, giving the impression that any moment the solemnity would detonate in a burst of more of his laughter. “It’s not as though we can get them to all come out and be totted up. They’d think it’s a cunning plan to get them all arrested. I know I’d think that. And from what I hear about Germany, if anything they had more homosexuals going about before the lot they have now came in. There was still a law like there is here, but in places like Berlin they didn’t much care about it anymore. That’s what my tribemates from around there have told me. As far as around here, I haven’t noticed nearly as much in the way of fascists, and there’s still that law about… but Toivo did tell me a silly story about Marshal Mannerheim. You know Mannerheim, right?”
“A little bit.” He wondered how many of the same things they knew.
“Well, Toivo told me quite a few silly stories about Mannerheim, actually, but in this one he’d brought a boy from the Urals, you know, back in the time of the tsars, to do his fetching and carrying. And the story goes that he was having sex with this boy. I’m not much in need or want of someone to fetch and carry, but I figure that if it’s good enough for Mannerheim it’s good enough for me.”
“Did he know?”
“He? Know what?”
“Järvinen. Did he know that you…”
Now Laukkanen did laugh, and even – while still lying down – threw his head back along the floor. “He certainly knew after that!”
“Oh.”
“And he was pretty embarrassed about it. He was trying to poke fun at Mannerheim, not at me.”
“Oh.”
***
Elias thought, turning the pieces around waiting for them to click in place. So he’d heard they tortured people, he’d heard they were chock full of homosexuals (and maybe surreptitiously they were, for all Elias knew, maybe there were far more than the few he’d bumped against fumbling in the dark, it wasn’t as if homosexuals ran around shouting it to the skies, and maybe a lot of them were like him and liked women well enough). Rape was one of those shitty Wyrm-soaked things people often did in wars, and since it involved fucking maybe Aleksandr figured a homosexual would be more likely to think of doing it to another man.
It seemed on a general level nobody liked the prospect of a man fucking around with other men, but they did like pointing at each other about it.
So it wasn’t all Elias giving him that idea. A good chunk of it was probably still him, to be sure, the dedication and so on, but not all of it. And he guessed it was the truth, not only because he wanted to believe it but because it had for once been volunteered. That was a small relief.
The talk of the mutilated bodies, though. The troops who’d done in that particular motti had been rushed to the Isthmus, no time to celebrate; it would be a while if ever before he could ask after that. His company hadn’t done anything quite like that, just dragged over and propped up a couple of the frozen-solid ones they’d found in the woods (not to mention the sentries with the cut throats, left where they’d not-fallen, the cold was that deep this winter), but maybe some other lot got more creative.
It was a good thing for them, though they’d never know it, that no one had ever crept up and cut Aleksandr’s throat in the night.
Someone had shot him, but at least that was at a distance, which gave them time to ski away; Crinos wasn’t quite optimal for moving in these snows. If Aleksandr had managed to catch the sniper while in frenzy, he probably would’ve taken note of the corpse when he came to. And if he’d been reluctant to mention he’d killed a Finn, the Warder – Ritva – still would have noticed. As far as the sniper himself, Delirium should have taken care of it.
Aleksandr said nothing else. Eventually, his breathing steadied. Elias lay close, maybe too close, and fell into the rhythm and fell into sleep after him.
***
Aleksandr woke with his face pressed into the blanket, damp around the eyes. He blinked and squeezed his eyes back shut, a few more stray tears slipping out, reaching after the dream he’d just had.
The encirclement again, he thought it had been. Malinovsky, Golubev, the usual. But then there was Mikhail, though Mikhail hadn’t been in his division, and Fyodor and Yulia, though Fyodor and Yulia were too young to be in the army at all and Yulia was a girl besides. Them and his mother and father and aunt and all four of his grandparents, and, and, and… He couldn’t remember what had happened to them all in his fast-dissolving dream – his nightmare. That was probably for the best.
But Princess Yelizaveta Volkovskaya had presided over everything. He was certain it was her, though when looking through her eyes in other dreams he hadn’t seen her face before. Garou symbols raced over her clothes in silver thread. Above her fur collar she was death-pale, moon-pale, her hair an almost equally pale blond in which silver and diamond and amber gleamed. The planes of her impassive face reminded him, logically enough, of Svetlana Volkovskaya. Her eyes were also a familiar blue – his eyes, Mikhail and Fyodor’s eyes, his mother’s eyes, but not his grandmother’s eyes and not, so he’d heard, his grandfather’s eyes.
And had this part of the dream, too, been some real echo, like the one of Princess Volkovskaya in Finland?
He couldn’t remember what she’d been doing in the dream but the inchoate idea still had his face pressed into the blanket, his shoulders twitching.
“Santeri?”
He twisted, looked up. Someone crouched over him and repeated, in a hoarse whisper, “Santeri?”
Aleksandr nodded. The man over him whispered something else in Finnish, which he didn’t quite grasp, and climbed his way over and out of the dugout. As Aleksandr watched him go out into the dark, reluctant to try to sleep again, Laukkanen whispered, “Aleksandr Sergeyevich? Are you all right?”
Out of some blend of fatigue and that odd defiance of last night, he didn’t want to lie right now. How could he really say no, though, when he was still in one piece? So Aleksandr said nothing.
“What did the Silver Fangs say to you?”
His voice came out too flat. “Not much I didn’t expect.”
“Oh. You see, they had to run for it out of Russia, so they’re especially bitter about Bolshevism and all of that. And it’s fine, really, not being one, didn’t I say, a lot of us aren’t –”
This repetition tripped some mechanism of his tongue he hadn’t known existed. “I wouldn’t want to be one even if they’d wanted me.”
Would he have said differently if it turned out they had wanted him? No – not in its essence, though probably he wouldn’t have said it aloud. He would’ve gone along, constantly hoping to get away and go home. And maybe if he got home there he might find other Garou, ones who didn’t talk that way, think that way; he might find a sort of pack he could blend into.
Even now, would they let him go home when the war was over?
The war had to be over, some day. They’d said at first it would be finished in time to be Stalin’s birthday present. Stalin’s birthday had come and gone, but still, eventually, with sheer numbers if nothing else… surely Finland couldn’t win.
He knew better than to say this to Laukkanen.
Maybe he’d already said too much because now there was a tautness in Laukkanen’s voice, an excessive patience slathered atop it, when he said, “Listen. I know being brought up by humans you learn certain things. I know being brought up in Russia now you learn more things. But what you have to understand now is that a lot of those things you learned are wrong.”
Next chapter here.
