Running with the Pack

RED RIDING HOOD’S CHILD N.K. JEMISIN

If Anrin had not needed to finish the hoeing, all might have gone differently. The blacksmith was a strong man and the walls of the smithy were thick. Not that the smith would have killed him—except perhaps accidentally, if he’d put up too much of a fight—but his future would have been set in the eyes of the villagers. Blood told, and they’d been waiting for Anrin’s to tell since his birth. This was what happened instead.

“Come here, boy,” said the smith. “I’ve something special to give you.”

Anrin stopped hoeing the tailor’s garden and obediently crossed the road to the smithy. “More work, sir?”

“No work,” said the smith, turning from the doorway to reach for something out of sight. He returned with a big wooden bowl, which he held out to Anrin. “See.”

And Anrin caught his breath, for the bowl held half a dozen straw-berries.

“Lovely, aren’t they? Got them from a nobleman traveler as payment. Came from the king’s own hothouses, he swore. Have one.”

They were the most beautiful strawberries Anrin had ever seen: plump, damp from washing, redder than blood. Entranced, he selected a berry—making sure it was small so that he would not seem greedy—and took a careful bite from its tip. To make it last he rolled it about on his tongue and savored the tart-sweet coolness.

“Lovely,” the smith said again, and Anrin looked up into his wide smile. “If you come inside, you can have more. I have sugar, and even a bit of cream.”

“No, thank you,” Anrin said. He gazed wistfully at the strawberries, but then pointed toward the half-hoed garden. “Master Tailor will be angry if I don’t finish.”

“Ah,” said the smith. “A pity. Well, you’d better get on, then.”

Anrin bobbed his head in thanks and trotted back across the road to the garden. He’d finished the hoeing before it occurred to him to wonder why the smith, who had never been kind to him before, had suddenly offered him such a delicacy.

No matter, he told himself. The strawberry had been ever so sweet.

Once upon a time in a tiny woodland village there lived an orphan boy. As his mother had been less than proper in her ways—she died unwed, known well to several men—the villagers were not kindly disposed toward the tiny burden she left behind. They were not heartless, however. They reared young Anrin with as much tenderness as a child of low breeding could expect, and they taught him the value of honest labor so that he might repay their kindness before his mother’s ways took root.

By the cusp of manhood—that age when worthier lads began to consider a trade and marriage—Anrin had become a youth of fortitude and peculiar innocence. The villagers kept him at arms’ length from their homes and their hearts, so he chose instead to dwell within an eccentric world of his own making. The horses and pigs snorted greetings when he came to feed them, and he offered solemn, courtly bows in response. When the villagers sent him unarmed into the forest to fetch wood, he went eagerly. Alone amid the dappled shadows he felt less lonely than usual, and the trees’ whispers were never cruel.

Indeed, Anrin’s fascination with the forest was a source of great anxiety to the old woodcutter’s widow who boarded him at nights. She warned him of the dangers: poison mushrooms and hidden pitfalls and choking, stinging ivies. And wolves, of course; always the wolves. “Stay on the path, and stay close to the village,” she cautioned. “The smell of men keeps predators away . . . most of the time.”

Old Baba had never lied to Anrin, so he obeyed—but in the evenings after his work was done, he sat atop the small hill near the old widow’s cottage. There he could gaze out at the dark, whispering forest until she called him down to bed.

On one of those nights, with a late winter chill making the air brittle and thin, he heard a howl.

The next day began the same as always. At dawn he rose to do chores for Baba, and then he went from house to house within the town to see what needed doing.

But as Anrin came to the smithy, he noticed an odd flutter in his belly. His first thought was that he might’ve eaten something bad, or perhaps pulled a muscle. After a moment he realized that the sensation was not illness or injury, but dread. So startled was he by this—for he had never feared the villagers; they were too predictable to be dangerous—that he was still there, his hand upraised to knock, when the door opened. The smith’s apprentice Duncas stood beyond, escorting another village man who held a new riding-harness. Both of them stopped at the sight of him, their expressions shifting to annoyance.

“Well?” Duncas asked.

“I came to see what chores the smith has,” Anrin replied.

“He’s busy.” Beyond Duncas, Anrin saw the smith talking over a table with another customer.

“I’ll come back tomorrow, then.” Nodding politely to Duncas and the goodman, Anrin turned away to leave and in that moment felt another strange sensation: relief.

But he had other houses to visit and other work to do, and by sunset he had forgotten all about the moment at the smithy.

That evening Anrin again sat on the hilltop and looked out over the dark expanse of trees. This time he heard nothing but the usual sounds of night, though he found himself listening for the mournful cadence of wolfsong. He heard none—but as the waxing moon rose he thought he saw something move in the distance. He narrowed his eyes and made out a fleet dark form running low to the ground against the tree line.

“Come down, boy,” Old Baba called up, and with a sigh Anrin gave up his darkgazing for the night.

Old Baba did not greet Anrin as she usually did when he reached the foot of the hill. Instead she gazed at him long and hard until he began to worry that he had done something to upset her.

“The gossips in the village are all a-whisper, Anrin,” she said. “They say the smith offers you gifts.”

Unnerved by her stare and the statement, Anrin said, “A strawberry, Baba. I would never have taken it if he hadn’t offered.”

“Did he ask anything in return?”

“No, Baba. He said I might have more if I came into the smithy, but I had other work. What’s wrong? Are you angry with me?”

She sighed. “Not with you, child.” After another moment’s scrutiny, she took hold of his chin. “You are not quite a boy anymore.”

The gesture surprised Anrin, for Baba had never been particularly affectionate with him, though she was never unkind either. He did not resist as she turned his face from side to side. “Such thick dark hair, such deep eyes . . . so like your mother. You’ve grown beautiful, Anrin, did you know that?”

Anrin shook his head. “The moon is beautiful, Baba. The forest is beautiful. I am neither.”

“No, you’re the same,” she said. “Just as wild, and just as strange—but innocent, at least for now.” She sighed almost to herself. “So many things out there would devour that innocence if they could.”

“Things . . . in the forest, Baba?” Anrin frowned.

She smiled a little sadly and let him go. “Yes, child. In the forest. Now get to bed.”

All through the next day, Anrin pondered the conversation with Old Baba. Should he have refused the smith’s gift? Baba had denied being angry with him, but if not him then whom? The smith, perhaps . . . but why?

He had come to no conclusion by the time he finished bringing water to fill the leatherman’s curing-cistern, and climbing trees to gather winter nuts for the trapper’s wife. At sunset he wandered back to Baba’s, intending to climb the hill again. But when the old woman’s cottage came into view, the door was open with a familiar man’s silhouette blocking the light from within. Voices drifted to him, sharp and angry on the chilly wind.

“—a fair price,” the smith was saying. All but shouting, and Anrin saw that his nearby hand gripped the doorjamb so tightly that the wood groaned. “I’m generous even to offer. It’s time the boy earned his keep!”

“Not like that,” Baba’s voice snapped from within. Anrin had never heard her so angry. “And you’ll not take him either, not while I still have lungs that can shout and hands that can wield a pitchfork. Now get out!” And her gnarled hand shoved against his chest; when he stumbled back the door slammed in his face.

The peculiar flutter in Anrin’s belly returned fourfold. He stepped off the dirt path that led to Baba’s farm and crouched in the bushes. A moment later the smith passed by, muttering imprecations and swinging his great clenched fists. When he was gone, Anrin climbed out of the bushes. He considered going to the house to talk to Baba, but already the day had been too strange; he wanted no more of it. He went to the hill, climbed up, and sat there too troubled to find any of his usual comfort in the night.

“Anrin,” Baba called after a while, and silently he went down to her.

Her lips were still tight with anger, though she said nothing of the smith’s visit and he did not ask. Instead she took him by the shoulder and steered him toward the barn as they walked. “Before you go to work in the morning, Anrin, I want to talk to you. Not now, of course; you’ve had a long day.”

“Yes, Baba,” he said uneasily. He suspected she meant to speak of the smith. He would be able to ask her all the questions in his mind at last, he realized, but he was no longer certain he wanted to know the answers.

“Sleep well tonight, Anrin—and be sure to lock the barn door behind you.”

Anrin blinked, for he had never locked the barn in all his years of sleeping there.

“Mind me, child,” she said, pushing him into the barn. “Bolt it fast, and open it for no one before dawn.”

He turned to her on the threshold, all the small disturbances of the past three days welling up inside him. He wanted to somehow vomit the strange feelings forth, expel them from his heart before they could poison him any further, but he could think of no way to do so.

She stood watching him, perhaps getting some inkling of his thoughts from his face; her own was softer than usual. She put a hand on his shoulder and he almost flinched as one more disturbance jarred him, for she had to reach up to touch him. Unnoticed, unmarked, he had grown taller than her.

“In case of wolves, child,” Baba said. “Lock the door in case of wolves.”

It was a lie, he sensed, but also a gift. Until morning, the lie would give him the comfort he needed.

He nodded and she let him go, turning to go back to her cottage. He watched until she was inside, then closed and locked the barn door.

Beyond them and unseen by either, a shadow crouched at the edge of the forest, only a few yards beyond Anrin’s hill.

Late in the night Anrin heard the barn door rattle. He woke right away, for he had slept lightly, his dreams turbulent and incomprehensible. Quickly he climbed down from the barn loft and went to the door. “Is that you, Baba?”

There was a moment’s silence from beyond. “It’s not Baba, lad,” came the smith’s voice. “Open the door.”

In Anrin’s belly the little flutter rose to a steady beat, spreading foreboding through his soul like night-breezes through trees. “You have work for me, sir? So late?”

The smith laughed. “Work? Yes, lad, work. Now let me in.”

“Old Baba told me not to.”

“As you like,” the smith said, but Anrin saw from the shadows under the door that the smith’s feet did not move away. Instead the door began to rattle again, and Anrin remembered that the smith carried his tools with him always.

In the back of Anrin’s mind, the night breezes rose to a sharp, cold gust.

There was a horse door at the back of the barn. Anrin went there and pushed aside the pickle-barrel that blocked it. If anyone had asked, he could not have told them why he fled. All he could think of was the smith’s wide smile, and the sound of groaning wood, and the fear in Old Baba’s eyes. These indistinct thoughts lent him strength as he wrestled the heavy, half-rusted latch open.

And then Anrin was free of the barn, running blindly into the bitter night. At his back he heard the smith’s curse; the squeal of wood and metal; the querulous voice of Baba from within her cottage calling, “Who’s there?” Into the forest, the night breezes whispered, and into the forest he ran.

When the boy fell, too weary and cold to run any further, the shadow closed in.

Anrin awoke in dim smoky warmth and looked about. A fire flickered at his feet; the roof of a cave loomed overhead. He turned and found that his head had been resting on the flank of a great forest wolf. Silently it watched him, with eyes like the winter sun.

Anrin caught his breath and whispered, “Beautiful.”

Something changed in the wolf’s golden eyes. After a moment, the wolf changed as well, becoming a man.

“You do not fear me,” the wolf said.

“Should I?”

“Perhaps. You were nearly meat when I found you in the forest. I might eat you yet.” The wolf rose from his sprawl and stretched from fingers to toes. Anrin stared in fascination. The wolf’s body was broad and muscled, sleek and powerful, a model of the manhood that Anrin might one day himself attain. He stared also because had never seen a grown man unclothed before, and because Old Baba was not there to tell him to look away.

The wolf noticed Anrin’s gaze and lowered his arms. “Do you still find me beautiful?”

“Yes.”

The wolf smiled, flashing canines like knives. “Good.” He crouched, leaning close to sniff at Anrin. “You are not like other men. They fear the forest and all things beyond their control. They are like two-legged, hairless sheep.”

Anrin considered his lifetime among the villagers and found that he agreed. “Perhaps it is because I am a whore’s son.”

“What is a ‘whore’?”

“I have never been certain. The villagers call my mother that when they think I cannot hear them. Old Baba tells me only that my mother was too curious and too free, straying too often from propriety. I don’t see how that could be so terrible, since now it seems they want me to be like her.”

“Yes,” the wolf said. “That is the way of things.” He leaned closer, sniffing at Anrin’s hair, then his ear, then down the curve of Anrin’s neck. Anrin remained submissive when the wolf took hold of his shoulders and pressed him back on the packed earth. He knew that animals often inspected one another on first meeting, checking for health and strength. As a guest in the wolf’s den, he wanted to be polite.

“You are on the brink of a change,” the wolf said, tugging Anrin’s shirt open with his teeth. He sniffed at Anrin’s chest, lapped in passing at one of Anrin’s nipples. “You have felt it coming for some time now, I think. I have seen you sitting on the hilltop watching for it.”

Anrin shivered at the brush of the wolf’s nose against his skin. “I have been watching for nothing. Just the moon and the trees.”

“In your head, perhaps. But your body has been watching for what will come. It has grown and made itself ready. Are you?”

“I don’t know,” Anrin said. This troubled him for reasons he could not name.

The wolf sat up on his haunches, straddling him now. Anrin saw that the wolf’s skin was heavily furred with down. The wolf reached down to stroke Anrin’s chest and Anrin felt the caress of fur on the wolf’s palms as well. The sensation stirred yet another strange feeling within Anrin—something powerful for which he had no name. It was like the spike of fear that had shot through him when the smith came, and yet somehow entirely different.

“Others can smell your body’s readiness as I can,” the wolf said, his eyes gleaming in the dim light. “They will steal the change from you if you do not lay claim to it yourself. That is inevitable.”

“But . . . I don’t want to change,” Anrin said. “Why can’t I remain as I am?”

The wolf’s hands paused. “Because innocence never lasts.” Abruptly the wolf rose and went over to crouch by the fire, apparently losing interest. “But perhaps you are not yet ready.”

Anrin sat up and pulled his shirt closed, his hair tumbling disheveled about his face and shoulders. The wolf spoke in riddles, and yet Anrin thought he understood. The answers he wanted were here, if he could only grasp them. If only he dared.

“What should I do?” he asked the wolf.

“That is for you to say—for now,” the wolf said. “If you want to return to your village, follow the sun east. Take the bearskin in the corner since you have so little fur of your own.”

So Anrin rose, wrapped himself in the bearskin, and went to the thick oiled-hide curtain which served as the cave’s door. He paused at the threshold, but the wolf did not turn from the fire, and so Anrin stepped out into the light.

“When you grow tired of playing sheep,” the wolf called as the flap closed behind him, “come back to me.”

With his mind full of thoughts he had never pondered before, Anrin returned to the village.

But the smell of death was on the wind as Anrin stepped out of the trees.

It came from the barn, where the half-hinged door swayed like a drunkard in the noontime breeze. The creak of the hinge stuttered now and again as the door stopped against something lying across the threshold. A pitchfork, its tines dark and red at the tips. Beyond that lay Old Baba.

After gazing down at her body for a very long while, Anrin left the cottage and went back into the woods.

The sun had just set when Anrin found the wolf’s den again. The wolf crouched beside the fire as if he had not moved since Anrin left. Anrin walked up to him and stopped, his fists clenched at his sides.

“Old Baba taught me there are secrets in the forest,” Anrin said.

“That has ever been true,” the wolf agreed.

“She told me there are things in the forest that eat fools like me.”

“There are indeed,” the wolf replied.

“Make me one of them,” said Anrin, and the wolf turned to him and smiled.

When the wolf stood, Anrin saw that his body was different: still as muscular and powerful as before, but this time a part of the wolf had grown and now stood forth from his body unsupported. It was not the first time Anrin had seen such a thing—for his own body had done the same at times—but now at last he understood the why of the phenomenon, and what it implied for the immediate future. And this understanding in turn clarified the past: the smith’s offer of the strawberry, and Old Baba’s anger, and even the circumstances of Anrin’s birth. Both the villagers and the wolf had been right all along: some things were inevitable, natural. Blood always told.

“You are still beautiful,” he told the wolf.

“As are you,” said the wolf, who then took Anrin’s hand and laid him down on the bearskin and tore his clothing away. He caressed Anrin again with his down-furred palms, and licked Anrin with a long pink tongue, and finally lifted Anrin’s legs up and back, bracing them both to proceed.

“You’re certain?” the wolf asked. The smoke-hole was above them; a shaft of moonlight shone into Anrin’s eyes. In silhouette only the wolf’s teeth were visible.

“Of course not,” Anrin whispered, shivering with ten thousand fears and desires. “But you must continue anyhow.”

At this, the wolf smiled. That smile grew as his mouth opened impossibly wide, the canines flashing. He leaned down and Anrin trembled as those teeth touched the skin of his shoulder, then pressed, warning of what was to come.

Then the teeth pierced Anrin’s flesh, hard, burning like fire. In the same moment something else pierced him, just as hard but larger, just as painful but stranger, and Anrin cried out as his body was invaded twice over. The wolf growled and worked his jaws around the wounds, as if to make absolutely certain that the wolf-essence would pass properly. His teeth slid out, then in again—a little deeper, a little harder. And again. And again. And between Anrin’s thighs, the wolf’s hips mirrored his jaws.

And then Anrin was writhing as the change began somewhere deep within him, in his belly, in his veins, spreading outward like fire and consuming every part of him. Somewhere amid the searing waves the pain became pleasure and fear turned to savage delight. And as the wolf tore free to turn his bloodied face up to the moonlight, so too Anrin arched with him, and clawed him back down, and howled over and over for more.

In the morning Anrin slept, for it was the nature of wolves to shun the day. Toward evening he awoke hungry, and the wolf took him outside and taught him to read scents and to hunt for good, hot, fresh meat. When night fell the wolves ran together through the forest, traveling east to the edge of the village.

Old Baba had been wrong, Anrin understood now. The forest had its dangers, but so did the paths of men; in the end, it was simply a matter of choice. Sometimes it was better to charge roaring into the shadows than be dragged helpless and broken through the light.

He smiled to himself, wishing Old Baba could see him. What big teeth you have, she would have said.

All the better to eat men, Anrin would have replied.

Then with his packmate at his side, he slipped into the village to do just that.