Departures

“It is very well,” Telerikh said. Then he seemed to remember that Theodore, Niketas, and Paul were still standing close by him, suddenly alone in a chamber full of the enemies of their faith. He turned to them. “Go back to your Pope in peace, Christian priests. I could not choose your religion, not with heaven as you say it is-and not with the caliph’s armies all along my southern border. Perhaps if Constantinople had not fallen so long ago, my folk would in the end have become Christian. Who can say? But in this world, as it is now, Muslims we must be, and Muslims we shall be.”

“I will pray for you, excellent khan, and for God’s forgiveness of the mistake you make this day,” Paul said gently. Theodore, on the other hand, looked as if he were consigning Telerikh to the hottest pits of hell.

Niketas caught Jalal ad-Din’s eye. The Arab nodded slightly to his defeated foe. More than anyone else in the chamber, the two of them understood how much bigger than Bulgaria was the issue decided here today. Islam would grow and grow, Christendom continue to shrink. Jalal ad-Din had heard that Ethiopia, far to the south of Egypt, had Christian rulers yet. What of it? Ethiopia was so far from the center of affairs as hardly to matter. And the same fate would now befall the isolated Christian countries in the far northwest of the world.

Let them be islands in the Muslim sea, he thought, if that was what their stubbornness dictated. One day, inshallah, that sea would wash over every island, and they would read the Qu’ran in Rome itself.

He had done his share and more to make that dream real, as a youth by helping to capture Constantinople and now in his old age by bringing Bulgaria the true faith. He could return once more to his peaceful retirement in Damascus.

He wondered if Telerikh would let him take along that fair-skinned pleasure girl. He turned to the khan. It couldn’t hurt to ask.

NOT ALL WOLVES

I got the idea for this one looking out the kitchen window while I was doing the dishes. If s far from the only story notion that’s come to me in an unexpected place while I was doing something that wasn’t even remotely connected to writing. The trick is to get the idea down on paper before you lose it again. “Not All Wolves” is a story of man’s inhumanity to man, among other things.

Archbishopric of Cologne: 1176

A full moon hung in the clear dark sky. Dieter ran through the streets of Cologne. Mud splashed under the pads of his feet. It flew up to stick in lumps in the matted fur of his tail. He turned sharply and dashed down a narrow, stinking alley.

Much too close behind turn, someone cried, “There he goes! That way!” A score of men or more were hunting him. Their high, excited shouts reminded him of the baying of wolves.

Had he been in his own familiar body, he might have laughed, or cried, or both at once. In the wolf’s shape he wore, he could only whimper. He tried to run faster.

Torches appeared at the mouth of the alley, casting a flickering light down its length. Dieter’s eyes saw that only as brighter grayness. A wisp of breeze brought him the smell of torch-smoke, and of his pursuers. He could smell their fear, and their resolve.

The men knew nothing of the wondrous things his nose told him, any more than a deaf man could follow a minnesinger’s song. But their eyes, now, were keener than his; they were many; and they could plan. More shouts rang out:

“There he is!” “Which way did he turn?” “To the left!” “No, to the right, you idiot!” “Yes, to the right! I saw him too!” “Klaus, Joachim, and Hans, up to the street of the tailors, and quickly! Don’t let the cursed beast get through that way!”

And one more cry over and over again: “Kill the werewolf!”

It’s not my fault, Dieter wanted to explain. I do no harm. But when he opened his wolfs jaws, only a wolf’s growl came out.

And those wolfs jaws, he could not deny, held a full set of wolf’s teeth. He could feel them, jagged against his tongue, which hung from the side of his mouth as he panted in the air he needed to run and run and run.

Inside the body of a wolf, though, he kept the wits he had had as a boy. If the street of the tailors was still unblocked, he might yet break away from the pack yes, that was the proper word, he thought at his heels.

Too late, too late! He heard Klaus, Joachim, and Hans beat him to the comer. They all carried torches; two had clubs, and the other a woodcutter’s ax. They looked this way and that. Good, Dieter thought. They did not know he was close by. They were only three, after all, not twenty. He sprang at them.

Two screamed like lost souls and fled. The third had more courage in him. His club thudded against Dieter’s ribs. Pain flared, then died. Dieter’s flesh mended with unnatural speed. Had the fellow thought to swing the torch, though, he might have done true harm.