The Mantooth

by Christopher Leadem

Chapter 47

That night Kalus dreamed he was alone in a dark cave, too small and dank for a man. But the light rose slowly through a stone-lipped entrance, and he saw a familiar form beside him as he sank into the wall, to watch. Kamela lay with three cubs beside her. But two had been turned to stone. He struggled to wake himself, because he knew what was to come.

A large wolf entered, looking black, and bared its yellow fangs. Another stood guard outside as the earth parted to admit the terrible and magnificent bastard, Shar-hai. He entered, silent as death, and lifted the living cub and set it gently, almost lovingly, in a corner. Kamela never once moved, or changed her expression as they came closer, snarling sadistically.

They raped her, as he struggled to break free. Only then it was no longer Kamela, but Sylviana they raped, and the face of Shar-hai became human as it tore at her. He struggled desperately and called her name as Smith and Rawlings pinned him to the floor. BUT THEY'RE MY FRIENDS! He cried out to her with heart-crushing passion, as the sound of it filled his ears, and woke him.

*

He lay on his back, wet with sweat, unable to remember. He threw off the sleeping bag which now seemed to him a coffin, or a mummy's wrap. He tried to shake off the dream, but the images of Kamela's rape had never left him, and those of Sylviana as the victim transferred themselves with terrifying ease. His own reality, as it returned to him, seemed far less real. And it came as no surprise as he recognized the human face of Shar-hai. It was William, his teeth like knives.

The sun was climbing: she would be awake. But this was only an afterthought, as he ran toward the compound. He threw open the first door, then the second, and burst into the room he had never seen. She was there, half dressed, seeming but a continuation of the dream from which he felt he had not woken. For there was no waking from the truth.

'Sylviana,' he pleaded, closing the door while she glared at him.
'You must not see William today. I have seen a terrible vision. And
I know, as I have always known….. He will rape you, and try to hurt
you! Perhaps he will even (the thought was unendurable), KILL you.'

She forced herself to finish dressing calmly, as he forced himself not to touch her. But as she tried to walk past him as if he did not exist, he could contain himself no longer. He seized her by the arms, and both lost control.

'You can't go to him!' he shouted. 'I won't LET you.' And his hands were like claws. Then they softened, along with his eyes, and he all but begged her. 'PLEASE.'

'Take your hands off me!' she cried, breaking free with a terrible strength of her own. 'Don't you touch me, ever!' He drew back from her, trembling.

'Haven't you punished me long enough?' he said. 'I am SORRY. For this. For everything. I am in agony; is that what you wanted? But I am also afraid for you, mortally afraid. In some things you are still very naive. You can't see, no one can see, what he will do to you! But I know the look in his eyes, because I have seen it before. It stood in front of me in the arena, at no greater distance than the length of my sword—-'

'Shut up!' she screamed. 'You shut up! What do you know about MEN? You couldn't, because you're barely more than an ape yourself. Go back to your beloved hill-people, and eat rotten meat in the dirt!'

But here she paused, remembering her purpose. And through the heat of the first real hatred she had ever felt for him, came the cold touch of poise in the act of betrayal, and she knew with a twisted thrill what it was to surrender to Evil.

'But if you're really worried,' she said placidly, 'Wait for me at the Vale of the Obelisk. I'll meet you there at noon, to tell you of our love-making. And then we'll say goodbye, forever.'

She strode out, and left him shaking. He fell to his knees and wept, much as William had screamed, to find his lover dead. He was alone in a dark cave, too small and dank for a man…..

*

William did not wake, because he had not slept. He told himself that he was letting it build inside him, mounting toward the kill. But in truth he was far beyond even that. The amphetamines he had injected though every voice of body and mind cried against it, ate him like a cancer. He had lost all control. This would be an act of vengeance, but not his vengeance. Somewhere in the mincer of pain and loss he had become the very thing he had fought all his life against, what he swore he would never become: an instrument in someone else's, someTHING else's hands. He could not admit this. He could not admit, or think, of anything. For his mind was no longer his own. Not by a conscious act of submission—-

He gave a violent cry and hurled a bottle at the crumbling half-wall. As it shattered, as he saw the broken glass and knew what it could do to human flesh, he remembered his purpose. In large, painful gulps he drained most of a second bottle, letting the wine take the place of blood in his veins.

He would be Master yet. The sun was up and it was day. He would have her, and then destroy her. Then destroy himself. Nothing else mattered, and Nothing never needed justification. It simply was, the only truth: the hole when the bottom fell out. It was the naked razor, stalking through the streets, cutting out men and women at random. Letting some grow fat for its later pleasure. Wantonly hewing the poor, who though possessed of a greater capacity for suffering, had reached the limits of endurance and could be tortured no more.

He had become a willing servant of the thing he had always fought, and feared. But he did not care.

He did not care.

*

When he came to her, as arranged, there was a moment when Sylviana saw what Kalus had seen: a wild, desperate hunger in his eyes, that could no longer feed on things which the earth gave as food. They wanted not flesh, but blood, not nourishment, but to mock the very act of nourishment. They could not be fed, or appeased, any more than one could quench the rape of napalm fire.

She turned away, and felt her heart throb violently in revulsion and fear. Only the perverse pride and will that had slowly taken hold of her, kept her from running away at the sight of him. This, and the stubborn naiveté of the illusioned, which told her this instinctive fear was a flaw of perception: that true, malignant evil did not exist, and that things could not possibly come to the ends envisioned by nightmare imagination. It was the same voice that told the world the Holocaust could not happen, was not happening, even as six million Jews, Russians, intellectuals, homosexuals and other defenseless minorities, were led to the fire. She listened to that voice, and made it her island of hope, the one that made the twisted dream of murder and healing, kindness through cruelty, destruction and rebuilding, still possible. Like one who had stared too long at the sun, insisting there was no danger, she was completely blind.

She turned back to him, more composed, and wondered only why he made no attempt to aid her: to dim the cutting laser of his eyes.

But he was through with hiding, and playing the part of the weak and worshipful lover. LET HER SEE! rang the twisted chime of his thoughts, distorted and horrible. Let her walk into the jaws of death with eyes wide open. And this choice also was correct: that his eyes and intentions were obvious, only made them the more impossible to believe.

She merely said, 'Shall we go?' And she couldn't understand why at that moment she should think of the black widow that her father had found in her bedroom as a child, killing it as she cried at his cruelty.

*

Kalus sat on a piece of broken stone with his head in his hands, unable yet to look up and go on. Alaska stood before him, puzzled. Her young mind had continued to develop, so that now she was aware of her existence as clearly, if without the same complexity, as any human adolescent. In the preceding weeks she had realized that such a choice might come: a choice between the two people she loved. And for reasons no more complicated than simple feeling, she had chosen Kalus, had remained with him as he lay helpless on the floor, and not followed when Sylviana called to her angrily.

It was his one compensation. He knew that if he left the colony the cub would go with him, regardless of what lay ahead. It was that simple, and that beautiful. And in that moment, alone and forlorn among the ruins of yet another tortured depression, this singular act of giving broke his heart. Because he saw in her pure, animal innocence the thing that he had always wanted from a woman, but had not dared to ask:

Loyalty, which so many have forgotten, and for which there is no other word. And not the pale imitation of it found in some marriages, which demand that each cut off and subvert some part of themselves, to be joined like hobbled twins at the place of amputation. What he wanted was nothing more and nothing less than the bond of true allies: not half a woman, because of him, but a whole woman, for the same reason. Not to enslave but to enrich, not to question in time of crisis, but to love and support, not blindly, but freely and fully. All these things he had offered her; but he knew they meant nothing if she was unwilling to give the same in return. Because there is no such thing as one-sided love.

He did not know how he understood these things, or why they had come to him now, only that he knew them, and that their truth was unbending. Yes. He would wait for her at the designated time and place. If she came to him and said she could not do it, and asked his help to rebuild the things that they had lost, he would remain with her forever.

But if she came to him in mocking triumph—-if she ever again spoke to him as she had—-all was finished between them. He would leave her, leave this place, and never look back. There was no middle ground. Because he knew finally, defiantly, that he was physically incapable of being other than himself, and should never have tried to be. The consequences of rejection would be devastating, and in the cold light of day he did not know how he would find the will to go on, without her. But this no longer mattered. Nothing mattered, but that this agony and fear must end. There was no other way.

He rose and walked the remaining distance. To the Vale of the Obelisk.
To wait.

***

SO FAR IT'S GONE WELL ENOUGH, she told herself, though she still could not look at him, or one second further than the present. They sat together on the sunlit slope of a wide, grassy recession. Its quiet symmetry would have been lovely and serene, but for a single thrust of gnarled stone which pierced its center, ringed about the base by a matting of jagged weeds. The company called it Devil's Thumb. It was a protrusion of the devil to be sure, but she wasn't at all sure that thumb' was the correct metaphor. She kept her eyes away from it, concentrating instead on the white sheet spread beneath them, on the bread and wine before them.

He had brought the wine, for which she was grateful, and she drank of it probably more than she should. But it gave her confidence, and helped dull the edge of her rebelling senses. Perhaps half an hour had passed from the time of her first ready mouthful; and he smiled each time the glass touched her lips. If an eerie contraction of taut face muscles can be called a smile.

'Have you ever done hallucinogenic drugs?' He tried to ask carelessly, but could not quite pull it off.

'What on earth made you ask that?'

'Oh, nothing really. Just curious.' She wished he would stop looking at her that way.

'Yes I have. Once, with Kalus. We….. It was peyote.'

'How much did you do?'

'Two buttons each. One right away….. Why are you laughing?'

'Two peyote buttons, and you think you've seen it all. Ha! That wouldn't be enough to open your pretty little eyelids.' She wondered why she suddenly felt restless and irritable.

'What makes you think it's only how much, and not how pure? Or maybe we just didn't need to have our whole consciousness blown away to get something meaningful from it.' She felt angry, defiant, and horribly uncomfortable. 'I could do LSD if I wanted to.'

'Could you now? We're going to find out.' She felt the touch of an icy hand inside her.

'What do you mean?'

'The wine is laced with it.'

And the current closed over her head.

*

Kalus sat in the fore of the leering monolith, which lay just inside the rim of the oblong vale. The dwarfish Obelisk, like a pointed tombstone, lay swart and square in its center. Kalus remembered the first time he had come here, driven on by Sylviana's almost distracted haste to find others of her kind. AND TO ESCAPE, he thought bitterly, HER DEPENDENCE ON ME. It was here, beneath the monolith, that he had tried to cleanse and bandage the wound on her leg. The memory and sight of it, of blood on her beloved flesh, filled all his thoughts. Through the strong taste of pride and anger, a fresh and cutting sense of worry returned to him. The protective instinct was too strong inside him, and what they had shared, too deep.

He thought of following after her, but did not know which way she had gone, and doubted Alaska's ability (as well as his own) to find and isolate her most recent trail among the layered and crisscrossing paths of the colonists. He could only wait, and watch the sun wheel the shadows around him. When the longer shadow of the Monolith joined that of the deeply carved Obelisk, locking together into a long sword of darkness upon the earth, it would be time. And she must come to him.

But that remained at least two hours away. He looked down at the deerskin pouch, which had slipped from his shoulder and rested, half open, on the ground. Remembering one of its contents, he emptied it out onto a gray, porous stone before him.

There, beside the wrapped hunting knife (which she now refused to carry), the whet-stone, and the flints for making fire, he saw them. Dryer, less green, but still potent in their otherworldly magic: the five remaining peyote buttons. He lifted one and turned it in his hand, wondering. It had helped him to understand once before….. Perhaps it would show him something now, which he could see no other way.

Guided by an impulse he did not completely understand, and half against his better judgment, he put the first in his mouth, and chewed it. Then slaked his throat with water. Again. And a short time later, again.

*

There are no words to describe LSD. For the person who has taken it before it is still like landing from another planet: nothing is familiar, and nothing can be taken for granted. Everything is powerful, evocative, unknown. For the person who has not, it is like a bewildered and even unconscious dream. If the experience is good, it is life at its deepest and most intense. If it is bad, there is no greater horror on the Earth. And in either case, the mind is never quite the same. Doors are opened which cannot later be shut, and some residue, both chemical and spiritual, remains forever.

The acid that William had made was not particularly strong or pure, and this alone saved her sanity. But it was strong enough, and tinged with strychnine and speed. She could not hide, from anything.

Sylviana tried to master her panic. And so far, by the narrowest of margins she had succeeded. ALL RIGHT, she told herself. All right. It had happened. There was nothing to done now but see it through. Except that she kept forgetting what the words meant, forgetting the words she said, forgetting words. She was alone in a gruesome place with a man she did not know or trust. She could not force herself to remain there a moment longer.

'We have to go,' she said, rising. The motion, scarcely felt, elevated her head, the line of her sight. But she could not shake the feeling of being deep under the water, lungs bursting for air. She wanted to swim with all her strength, upward toward the surface. But some horrible weight, or cold serpentine grip held her down, wrapped about her legs and ankles. That grip was her obsession. The life-saving air was Kalus, and she knew it.

But no, her stupor-rationale insisted. It's not so. I can breathe. I can walk. She strode to the top of the hill, feeling a moment's release, only to find that William had followed her soundlessly, like a shadow. And that she no longer knew where she was, or how to find her way back.

BACK. To what?

And then the real fear, the telling blows, began to find her. Because
it seemed, it was, an overriding certainty that there was no returning.
This was reality, doubly real. She had fallen into a bottomless pit.
NO WAY OUT!

'Let's go for a walk,' said William gently, now so sure of his prey that he was almost disappointed. But he would see it through, and knew that to do so he must build her up again, just enough. Then tear her down. Again, until the moment was ripe. And then God help her.

But Sylviana was there ahead of him. She clung to this mockery of care and affection, five simple words, with all the desperate power of her desire not to believe. 'Yes, my dear, sweet William. Let's go for a walk.' And he smiled, a moment of sympathy that he knew would only make the fire of his hatred burn the whiter. She might make the going pleasing, after all.

'Yes,' he said wryly. 'A walking tour of the neighborhood.
I'll show you how the other half. . .dies.'

So they set out, Sylviana forgetting that this unraveled the last of her plans, and that Kalus would no longer be close at hand.

For better or worse.

*

Kalus remained, still as the stone on which he sat. He had moved some time before to the more level ground before the Obelisk, though the grotesque figures carved upon it kept him from coming too close. The peyote had begun to work on him, but its effect was entirely different than what he had hoped. Instead of giving him peace and a quiet understanding, it filled him with a dread that was almost physical. All his thoughts, worded and otherwise, seemed to crash in upon themselves like the breaking of a wave, crushing and smothering every positive impulse, every hopeful thought within him. He was back in the hopeless world of his past, from which she had helped him to escape.

But there was no escape. No matter how he turned it around, no matter what contingencies he tried to make and force himself to swallow, the bitter truth remained. Without his woman he had nothing: no love, no purpose, no home. No way to go on, and no reason to try. The ancient sense of fatalism and betrayal returned to him, with still greater intensity, because for a time he had been free. And the brief interval of spoken words and close female companionship evaporated, could no longer protect him from the silent, brutal worlds he had known. Again he saw before him the long chain of savagery and violence, of endless pain and pointless perseverance. All leading to this. To be broken and alone, as only the last of a species is alone.

He too felt the razor, though dully. And his one regret in those darkened moments was that he had been so skilled in eluding it.

*

'Forty-second street,' said William, continuing in the manner of a tour through Hell. They stood at the base of a long, flat stretch, like a sunken airport runway before them, the grassy dikes to either side still suggestive of the tombs, the mass graves they barely covered.

'You see before you a busy street—-strip joints, adult book stores, pornographic theaters. But you don't seem to notice the background much. No. It's the ragged flowers springing from the sidewalk that catch and hold your eye: prostitutes, the whipping girls of the city.

'On a good day all they're required to do is give their bodies to pawing, drooling idiots, who in their half-assed passion call them mother', cheap whore', or the name of some long-lost lover. Oh, but of course they don't really FEEL anything. They're not real people, like you and I.' At this he curled his lip, barely able to contain his rage. 'On bad days….. They're harassed and preyed upon by police, jaded social workers and psychotic killers, or just beaten and abused by the fatherly' pimps.

'And what is their crime, that makes them the object of universal scorn and reprisal? They're VICTIMS, vulnerable, bringing out the predatory instinct in all of us. And more than that, they commit the most unforgivable sin of all: they make us look at ourselves, and see something about our pretty little world that we don't like. Because they do, in fact, what the rest of us do in spirit: sell themselves, body and soul, for MONEY. Only they lack the skills and social graces, like the ones you learned in college, to be subtle and self-justifying about it. They are OBVIOUS, and much too real, an easy target for nearly everyone. And the human animal never misses easy prey.'

Sylviana heard the words—-stark and depressing enough—-but what gave them their power were the images her own memory provided. She saw it all: the rooster-like pimps grabbing gaudily dressed women by the hair, and without remorse throwing them into the back seats of still gaudier cars, for later punishment, which no doubt included beating and rape. And if her head happened to strike the roof, starting a rivulet of blood…..

And she remembered the murder she had so nearly witnessed: saw the chalk outline that the homicide detectives had drawn on the sidewalk as the paramedics arrived to wheel her into a waiting ambulance, her death a foregone conclusion, the eyes still terrified though the life even now fled from them. A face once young and fair: a sixteen-year-old runaway from nameless suburbs, driven from her home perhaps by an abusive parent, drawn to the city like a moth to flame. And brought to the same end. While the jagged man the police had cuffed and were dragging away, screamed in bursts of occasional coherence, 'All women are whores!'

And she remembered too, even as he said, the thoughts that she had always used to dismiss such women, and the hopeless tragedy of their lives. HOW CAN THEY DO IT? THEY MUST JUST TURN OFF THEIR MINDS, AND NOT FEEL ANYTING….. IT'S AWFUL, BUT SHE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER THAN TO WALK THE STREETS ALONE. As if this was something she had done of her own volition, and against the warnings of loved ones and friends. And she thought of her own plan, which was worse. Not to sleep with a man for money, which could at least claim the honest shred of need. But for revenge.

And coming back to herself for a moment, she realized with a sudden shock that this same plan, along with the subconscious safety valve she had built into it, were now completely out of hand. She had no idea where they were (in relation to anything else), only where they weren't: within hearing range of Kalus, on whom she had relied to protect her at need. As the dagger of fear sank an inch lower into her breast.

'You're right William,' she said hurriedly. 'And it's horrible. But please, please take me somewhere else.' Sheer movement seemed the only defense from the razor—-

'My GOD.' There seemed to be a literal razor forming out of the air before her, a glint of sunlight on cold steel. She cowered, and crossed her arms defensively in front of her.

'Oh, no, not yet,' said the Stranger, as if he understood it all. He seized her by one foreshortened arm, and led her toward the next exhibit. After an interminable length of time he stopped again, and pointed.

'Seventh Avenue.'

*

Kalus remained, still as stone, but no longer in confusion and despair.
He stood rooted to the spot in horror.

The two shadows had met and become one, a broadsword of Death upon the wounded earth. The sun was now directly south of the monolith. Yet it was not the Shadow, but a patch of wicked, unexpected Light that showed him in a searing instant the real danger into which his woman had fallen, and the true Evil that walked upon the earth. A square-cut hole high in the center of the monolith, hidden earlier by its vague, uncontoured grayness, now let through a shaft of light, which came to rest in impossible coincidence upon a single carving of the dwarfish Obelisk: the face of a horned Devil, its lolling tongue six inches long, was held in the internal pentagon of a ghoulish star, pointing downward. Carved perhaps by some mutant from the days when half-men, like lepers, still clung to the fire-pillaged rock, it looked down upon the slab of altar at its feet, just large enough for a child, just deep enough to contain its flowing blood. As remorseless and aroused, the Beast smiled in the helpless light of day.

'Sylviana!' he cried aloud, knowing now that only he could save her. No answer. He stood up and called again, one last act of desperation.

Nothing. He went down on one knee, and patted the ground with his open hand. He needed no more prodding. The time had come to act.

'Alaska,' he whispered intently. 'Sylviana. SYLVIANA.' This time the cub seemed to understand, and apparently had some insight as to where they might be found, for she set out at once. Or at least some idea where they might begin to look.

If it was not already too late.

*

'Stop it! Stop it!' she cried, covering her face with her hands. She had gone with him, and listened as he spoke of junkies, toxic waste, victims and violence and hospitals. From place to place, in growing horror, thinking with one last gasp of real courage that perhaps she deserved this, and needed to know.

But when he brought her at last to the ruins of an enormous research facility, and began to describe, in detail, the torturous experiments performed here on bound, terrified animals in the name of progress and the greater good, she felt the tip of the blade licking at her heart.

Because she knew it was true. Her father had been assigned here as an intern. He had stormed out in a rage at the asphyxiation, force-feeding of toxic substances, vivisection, 'Sweet Jesus,' and stress tests', performed on dogs and cats, rhesus monkeys and other primates, some more intelligent than the lackeys who tormented them. Refusing to participate had put his career in jeopardy, something he was willing to do, to stand up against what he knew was wrong and indefensible. And he had spoken out against the Horror, for those who could not speak.

But many of his colleagues had not been willing. All the beloved doctors and scientists, characterized as forthright, altruistic men and women, working for the good of humanity, if not actively involved, at least turning the other way as innocent, uncomprehending creatures were subjected to physical and psychological tortures that were the rival of the Holocaust. The Leeds Institute of Animal Research, called by its critics, LIAR.

She kept thinking of Alaska.

But William felt no sympathy for her. The fact that such men had murdered themselves in the process, that humanity had been no kinder to its human victims, that it was over now', could not cover the brutal shame of it. All of it. Could not bring back the dead. The innocent and the dead, who had been helpless before the grim machinations of vicious human fear and ignorance.

He let her remain there, hobbled against a mound of slag. Then he drew out his stiletto, and shot the blade into place. And held it six inches from her face. She had ceased weeping and sat helpless, sobbing, ready for the fall. As he said in a gentle, sing-song voice.

'Time to wake u-up.'

She opened her hands and her eyes, as if seeing for the first time.

She opened her eyes. The razor stood before her. Not as some dark and frightening intangible, but a stark physical reality, held in the iron grip of her fellow man. Because malicious evil is still only a weapon, and requires willing human hands to wield it.

For a single instant she sat there numb, neither believing nor comprehending. But then he seized her violently by the front of the blouse, lifting her to him. And with a quick insertion of the blade and a hard jerk backwards, he cut away her bra, ripping the garment wide open as he threw her back onto the ground.

A startled, 'William, don't do this,' tried to form in her throat, but was drowned out as he screamed in a wrath no longer his own, but that of all creatures brutalized and turned vicious by the bloody hells from which man has barely begun to raise himself.

'And do you know who's going to PAY for it! YOU ARE!'

One word alone would form from her terror, a last, instinctive cry against the Razor, and the trickle of blood at her breast. She screamed, louder than he.

'KALUS!'

*

>From a distance of three hundred yards he heard her. Instantly his senses were trained upon the spot and he was running, leaving the startled cub far behind. The broken, undulating ridges kept her from his sight, and tried to impede him. But he did not need to hear the sound twice to locate it, or force his hammering body to respond.

And by the time he reached the final crest, his anger had turned to a rage that bordered on madness that ANYONE, EVER, would DARE to attack his woman. All his pain and frustration now found release in thoughts, soon to be acts, of violence. The sight of them struggling, of William again throwing her down and glowering over her, knife in hand, undid the last thin strands of mercy and restraint. He all but flew down the hill, and from atop the same mound of slag, leapt out like a panther with a savage cry.

An instant later their bodies crashed together, as Sylviana crawled back against the shelter of broken stone, drawing her torn blouse shut against the maelstrom.

William was stunned, the knife sent flying from his hand. For all the hardships of his life, he had never before faced the merciless onslaught of an animal defending its own. Blows rained upon like a landslide, and he knew that his death was at hand. He backed away in desperation, crawling on his elbows, pushing with his legs.

But Kalus was already on his feet, the sword seething from its scabbard. He lofted it high above his head, both hands hard on the hilt, as his eyes chose the place that he would strike, a thundering blow to cut his enemy in two.

But then time stood still.

*

Time stood still.

Kalus looked into the face of the man he was prepared to kill. A hideous change had come over it. His heart wrenched inside him, and the blow never fell. Sylviana gasped as well, and struggled for the breath to plead mercy. But there was no need, as both finally understood the words of the Spirit.

There before him, where a human form had been, lay the contorted figure of a demon, a face twisted and insane. A man possessed. But not by some Bible-black devil, or mythological spirit of Evil. By the more real, the more horrible.

The demon, the reality, of Fear.

Slowly Kalus lowered his sword, sick with pity and remorse, as Sylviana hid her face against the stone.

More slowly still, some semblance of its original shape returned to the red terror of William's face. And as terrible to him as his own countenance had been to Kalus, were the words that his enemy now spoke, who should have killed him.

'Forgive me,' said the man-child sorrowfully. 'I didn't understand.'

As if struck by a hammer, William fell back. Something inside him tried to laugh, but was drowned instead by anguished tears, and a groan of pain that twisted his soul like a rag. The terrible voice continued as the cub, knowing nothing yet of hatred and violence, but only an instinctive compassion, came closer and licked his face.

'I knew only that you had lost your woman. I did not know how deeply you loved her, or what it had done to you….. We will leave you now, because you need to be alone.'

Then Kalus drew a breath, remembering hard reality.

'It is only possible for a natural man to forgive, when his enemy can no longer hurt those entrusted to his care. I cannot let you close to my loved ones, and if you ever again try to hurt them, I will kill you without pity or remorse. But I see now your pain and sickness, and I will ask the others to help you if they can.'

And the fallen man hid his face in shame.

Sylviana, who had risen, moved now toward her beloved mate. She stood beside him, looking down, silently begging forgiveness. But his touch, the way his arms enfolder her, told her there was no need, said everything that must be said. Three words only remained, and she spoke them with all her heart.

'I love you.'