Wolves of Dacia – Chapter Six – In the Cause of Science

[Miki Yamuri]

Chapter Six – In the Cause of Science

(Wolves of Dacia – Anthony Burns, 2008, all rights reserved)

The Carpathians, 1916

The distant buzz of the biplane’s propeller was gradually fading, and although that was more than could be said for the echoes of its machine-gun fire and the screams of his dying comrades in Corporal Bartok’s mind, it was definitely worth a sigh of relief. When he was certain that the faintest note of its motorised dirge had gone from the skies, he emerged from the tangled bushes in which he had been crouching, extricated several stray brambles from his uniform, and descended the wooded slope into the glade. Its potential for shelter was considerable, as not only was it shadowed by the looming mountains on all sides except for the north, but it also contained several ancient stone structures: pathways cracked and obscured by invasive weeds and purple, bell-shaped flowers; colonnades half smothered by moss and ivy; and even a few intact buildings, about thirty feet tall including their pyramidal roofs; windowless; and each fronted by a portico with stone columns carved in the image of a female figure, the leaf-like patterns of her clothing possibly identifying her as a fertility goddess. The other members of his patrol, however, had avoided these ruins, preferring instead to shelter among the trees at the edges of the glade in various attitudes of fear and desperation.
The most pitiable case was that of Private Shandor, whom Bartok found upon his knees, his hands clasped together and his head bowed, mumbling quietly but urgently to God that he might possibly spare a little time, in spite of his numerous wartime commitments, to deliver them from evil. Bartok had lived in central Cluj for all of his life until the war, and had little patience for the colourful superstitions of rural Transylvania, though he could not deny that the glade had an air of mysterious abandonment that was nothing if not disheartening. Nevertheless, he was careful to avoid showing this, as he clapped his praying comrade heavily on the shoulder and addressed him in what was, at all events, intended to be an encouraging tone:

“You can give the God-bothering a rest, Laszlo. It’s given up the hunt.”

“I’ll wait till we’re clear of this cursed place, if it’s all the same,” replied Shandor, barely altering his posture. “I felt safer with that plane strafing us than I do down here. I’ll warrant devils have been worshipped in these temples. Can’t you feel it?”

“I’ll feel safer on the move again, I grant you,” he answered, diplomatically. “I don’t expect that’ll be too long, after I’ve told the captain we’re clear to go. Where’s he gotten to, anyway?”

“He grabbed a torch and went to have a look in that there temple,” said Shandor, pointing out the nearest and largest of the intact buildings, with unrestrained loathing. “Seemed dead excited about them, too, not that that’s any wonder. They say his great-grandfather was hung for celebrating a black mass, and you know what the aristocracy’s like for keeping up family traditions.”

“Go easy on that communist talk, mate,” admonished the corporal, though aware that Shandor’s pious superstition was matched only by his political ignorance. “I don’t want to hear none of that in front of Captain Dragomir. You’ll meet plenty of worse officers than him, mark my words.”

“Yeah … if I live to. The thought of a night spent in this godless pit-”

“Alright, I get that you’re not exactly wild about it,” interrupted Bartok, with a slight sneer that almost concealed his own eagerness to get underway. “Mind you, we ought to head back to base while there’s still any light at all. I’ll have a word with him … and try to keep alert, Laszlo. Divine intervention would be a fine thing, but I reckon that God helps those who help themselves.”

A quick walk across broken, overgrown flagstones and up a short flight of steps, polished to slippery smoothness by time, weather, and long-dead feet, and Bartok found himself within the temple, if such it was. It contained only the one, vast room, at the centre of which stood a stone dais with a cylindrical centrepiece, about three feet high, which might have been an altar. As Captain Dragomir passed his flashlight beam over it, the corporal saw flashes of intricate carvings: wolf-headed serpents, female deities or monsters with wings and clawed feet, and many other hybrid entities which strongly implied that the stonemason had possessed far more of an instinct for sculpture than for zoology. Captain Dragomir himself – thirty-six, tall, lean, with a striking aquiline face and long dark hair that would have been begging for an official reprimand on the head of any less well-connected junior officer – would have cut quite a dashing figure in most settings, but his present demeanour struck Bartok as being reminiscent of nothing quite so much as an excitable schoolboy on a trip.

“The preservation is simply astounding!” he enthused, barely sparing a glance for the corporal even as he addressed him. “There are still traces of polychrome on this stonework. Perhaps enough even to form the basis of a restoration project. See the green pigment on this relief: the lamia’s tail? Malachite, I think. Imagine what this place must have looked like when it was freshly painted throughout. If I could come here with a team of archaeologists … Damn this war … though I suppose I’d never have found the place at all but for that plane sending us running for the nearest cover. How it’s avoided getting on the map, I’ll never know. It’s a greater national treasure than Hunedoara Castle, and far more unique.”

“I wonder that myself, sir, but don’t your family own these lands?”

“It is an intriguing possibility that this glade might be among their dirty secrets,” he answered, in a tone of mockery that Bartok thought would more likely offend than relieve Private Shandor’s pious anxieties. “They had their fair share, God knows, but I felt that I was always more likely to make my mark on the world though science rather than Satan. After more than a decade’s worth of broadening my mind in the capitals of Europe and America, I find myself shamefully ignorant of my homeland, and this place came as a total surprise: a pleasant one, mind you. I doubt that even another decade’s worth of intensive study would do justice to these ruins.”

“Right you are, sir … only it’s getting rather dark out there, and the lads were wondering if-”

“Don’t fret, Corporal. I didn’t mean ten years starting from now. I just want to take a few more notes, then if it’s safe to move out there we can be on our way.”

Bartok tried to derive some comfort from this, bearing in mind that the flashlight was already outshining the weak light that filtered through the narrow door, along with the occasional howls of not-distant-enough wolves. That effort failed spectacularly, so he tried to distract his growing anxiety by taking an interest in the place.

“So … what do you reckon it is, sir? Tomb? Temple?”

“Very good, Corporal. One of the two, certainly. The design is stark, and certainly morbid, yet this central artefact is more of an altar than a headstone. That might be red ochre on the top, but my money is on sacrificial bloodstains. Some of the carvings are clearly images of death, but some are of rebirth: sun-symbols, a phoenix, and this device looks remarkably like an Egyptian ankh, though how it comes to be here-”

Before he could try Bartok’s patience any further with his interesting speculations, Private Shandor came scurrying into the chamber with such urgency that he only spared the most fleeting scowl of contempt for the pagan grandeur of his surroundings. That only momentarily detained him from expressing the purpose of his interruption.

“Beg pardon, sir, but we’ve got ourselves some company.”

“You could be a shade more explicit, Private,” said Dragomir, sardonically, though his vocal insouciance was not matched by his free hand, which leapt straight for his revolver. “Has the plane come back, or do you mean there are troops in the area?”

“Not exactly what I meant, sir. If you’d care to have a look …”

Bartok, for his part, required no such encouragement. Rifle at the ready, he rushed out of the doorway and back to the temple portico, where the other three survivors of the patrol had gathered. Looking out through the stone pillars, over the darkening glade, he saw dim shapes just beyond the tree line: low, lithe, four-legged shapes that were not as yet venturing into the open, but occasionally turned their glittering eyes in his direction while they circled the area, making their presence more powerfully felt with long-drawn howls that echoed portentously from the mountain slopes. By contrast, the curses that Bartok uttered under his breath reached no ears but his own. It was little wonder that this had happened, given the trail of blood and corpses they had left in the wake of their flight. Since Private Korda’s wounded leg was unlikely to heal in the time it would take the wolves to sniff out its location, the list of options was neither extensive nor attractive. Bartok ushered the rest of the men into the temple just as Dragomir was on the point of exiting, and forestalled the captain’s annoyance with a simple, grim evaluation of the status quo:

“Wolves, sir. More of the buggers than I can well count. We could try shooting them, I guess, but-”

“We’d risk giving our position away, not to mention facing any enemy patrols we should meet with empty guns. How’s your leg, Korda? Any chance you could run on it?” The hobbling, ashen-faced soldier in question replied with a feeble, but convincing shake of the head. “That settles it, then. We’ll have to hold out here until the coast is a little clearer.”

“All very well, sir, but what’s to stop them coming in here after us?” asked Shandor, his superstitious dread having revived somewhat at the prospect of spending a night in such unhallowed surroundings.

“They can come through that door one or two at a time, at most. That many we can deal with, if our ammo holds out, though if you’d rather go out there and gather enough rocks and timber to make a decent barricade, then by all means-”

“There’s always that altar stone, sir,” suggested Bartok, and though the look this earned him from his captain was in no sense enthusiastic, he pressed on: “Four of us might manage to shift it, and I reckon it’ll block off most of that doorway.” For a few seconds Dragomir merely stared at him, with an expression that clearly stated they had not fallen so low as to be manhandling irreplaceable Dacian artefacts as if they were sandbags. Another crescendo of howls, hollow and increasingly funereal-sounding, prompted a sudden rethink of his priorities:

“Very well. Korda: you get some rest. Bartok: you go back outside and keep watch. Let us know at once if they start coming closer. The rest of you, help me to move this monolith, and with the utmost care. You’ll not see one of these again in a hurry.”

Sounds good to me, thought Bartok, as he walked back out into the evening air, cold but very still due to the surrounding slopes, and about as bracing as the atmosphere of a crypt. The silhouettes of the wolves among the trees were hard to distinguish in the deepening darkness, though any hope that they might have gone was laid to rest by the persistent howls. They kept their distance, which was some comfort, although not enough to dissuade him from rolling a cigarette in the hope of some extra solace.
He had only just lit up when he became aware of a marked change in the ambience: namely that the howling had given way – or rather, seamlessly mutated into – a more melodic arrangement. It echoed through the glade in long, wordless notes, after the fashion of a liturgical chant, in distinctly male and female voices: an eerie and mournful harmony, yet beautiful, holding him in fascination in spite of his fear. Apart from a vague fondness for gypsy bands and American Ragtime, he was not musically inclined and had never been sentimental about it, but this ethereal cantata brought that well-worn cliché about music being the language of the soul into stark reality: it inspired him with joy and longing, which grew into a wild desire to find the singers, whatever the risk. With fast yet stumbling steps, as the last vestiges of his survival instincts tried in vain to hold him back, he left the portico and was halfway to the tree line when his thinly-rolled cigarette burnt down to his fingers, causing him acute pain, incipient blisters, and the recovery of his senses. As hypnotic fascination faded away and fear reclaimed its rightful station, traipsing off into the forest suddenly did not seem that intelligent a manoeuvre after all.
Blocking out the voices completely was impossible, but he found it took little effort to resist their lure, now that their first “hook” had been extracted. Bartok ran back to the temple, neither knowing nor very much caring how he was going to report on this experience. As it happened, it proved unnecessary, though what he found in the altar chamber made any feelings of relief unthinkable: his comrades had managed to move the monolith a few feet, but it was going no further as there was no-one left to complete the task. The captain’s flashlight lay on the floor, diffusing a sickly light into the room which seemed all the more ominously vacant for the narrow, dark manhole now revealed at its centre. That removed the mystery of where they had gone, though not the mystery of why they had gone without a light, and to think of a reason why they would have done so willingly was beyond Bartok’s imagination.
His heart giving the distinct impression that it would like to perform a jailbreak from his ribcage, he picked up the flashlight and crept up to the edge of the pit. After a short struggle between duty and reluctance, he shone the beam downwards, which proved somewhat anticlimactic: where he had half-expected a mile-long descent right into the heart of Hell, there was instead a shaft no more than ten feet deep which gave onto an arched passageway. A series of protruding stones formed a crude but serviceable set of rungs down the shaft wall, which even the wounded Private Korda might have managed, had an emergency escape-route been in demand. If that was indeed the case, then whatever they had fled from in such haste could only have entered the room while the corporal had been lured away from his post: a less than encouraging fact, as it led to the logical but loathsome conclusion that whatever had thus frightened them had also followed them, and was now down in that passageway, between him and his comrades.
A part of his brain of which he was by no means proud, but which he could not help concede might be the wiser part, was suggesting that any sensible man would report this incident and return with reinforcements rather than valiantly but insanely hurling himself into the lions’ den (or the wolves’, optimistically assuming that it was nothing worse). He was close to submitting to its seductive reasoning when, most unkindly, the distant echo of Private Shandor screaming came up the dark passage: not a sound he was in any danger of mistaking, given that the private was a nervous little greenhorn at the best of times, and today had been anything but. Bartok gritted his teeth, swallowed down his rising sense of nausea, slung his rifle from its shoulder-strap and the flashlight from a cord around his neck, and lowered himself upon the first of the stone rungs.

You see, Rothwyn? He’s not the coward for whom you take him. A good huntress should learn to discriminate her prey.

In spite of his shock, Bartok, narrowly avoided losing his grip, and as soon as his muscles were back under his full pilotage, he hauled himself out of the manhole, unslung his rifle, and swivelled his aim upon the temple door. Although the voice seemed to have arrived in his brain directly, without taking the standard route via his ears, it was nevertheless accompanied by a powerful sense of sheer presence from that direction. His instincts did not play him false, though all they enabled him to do was to fire a single, wild shot before the foremost of the advancing lupine shadows leapt forward and bore him to the ground, its jaws clamped around (and in) his right arm. Through the searing pain, he was only dimly aware of the many other dark grey shapes now swarming around him, and of their growls and snarls, but one thing remained clear above it all: that voice that traveled inaudibly through the air, as if one of these new-fangled radio receivers had been installed in his head and it was picking up its signal from Satan’s own transmitter:

Gently does it, my eager little Rothwyn. Invader or not, it would not do to kill him here. There are questions to which I would have answers, and custom demands that we put them all to the Test. If he fails badly, that would be a far more opportune moment to put him out of his misery.

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