The Wolf Gift (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 1)

"Maddened by the sounds and scents of their hatred for me, it was I who changed and attacked them."

His eyes grew wide peering into something that only he could see. They all sat silent waiting. There came over Reuben a strong sense of Morgon,s demeanor, the way that he maintained an unspoken supremacy though not a single inveterate gesture of his was imposing and his voice was, even at its most heated, rolling steadily beneath the governance of a deeply private and disciplined man.

"They were no match for me at all," he said with a shrug. "They had been like yapping puppies with milk teeth. I was a seething wolfen monster with a human being,s resolve and wounded pride. They didn,t have emotions like that! Nothing was so necessary to them, ever in all their lives, as killing them was then to me."

Reuben smiled. This so beautifully touched on the lethal edge of the human species that he marveled.

"Something far more deadly than either of us had ever beheld had now been born," said Margon. "The man wolf, the werewolf, the wolf man - what we are."

Again, he paused. He seemed to be struggling with something he wanted to express but could not.

"There,s so much about it I do not understand," he confessed. "But I know this and it,s what all people know now, that every particle of life explodes from mutation, from the accidental combining of elements on every level, that accident is the indispensable nuclear power of the universe, that nothing advances without it, without a reckless and random blundering, whether it is seeds ripped from a dying flower by the wind, or pollen carried on the tiny feet of winged insects or blind fish tunneling into caverns of the deep to consume life forms undreamt of by those on the surface of the planet above. Accident, accident, and so it was with them and with me: a blunder, a stumbling - and what you call a man wolf was born. What we called the Morphenkinder were born."

He stopped and drank some more of the coffee, and once again Reuben filled his cup.

Stuart was enthralled. But the old impatience was cooking again in him. He couldn,t help himself.

"There,s a virtue," Felix said, "to listening to a reluctant storyteller. You know that he is in fact diving deep for the salvageable truth."

"I know this," said Stuart, struggling. "I,m sorry, I know it. I know it. I,m just - . I want so much to - ."

"You want to embrace what you see before you," said Felix. "I realize. We all realize."

Margon was drifting. Maybe he was listening to the unobtrusive music, the isolated and methodical piano notes that rose and fell, rose and fell, as the Satie went on.

"And you managed to escape the island?" asked Laura. Her voice wasn,t tentative so much as it was respectful.

"I didn,t escape," Margon said. "They could draw but one conclusion from what they,d witnessed. Their gods had willed it, and Margon the Godless was none other than the father of their gods."

"They made you their ruler," said Stuart.

"They made him their god," said Thibault. "That,s the irony. Margon the Godless became their god."

Felix sighed. "Your inescapable destiny," he said.

"Is it?" asked Margon.

"And you will not be king amongst us, will you?" Felix said, almost confidentially as if the others weren,t there.

"Thank God for that," Thibault whispered with a secretive smile. "But really, I,ve never heard you tell the story in quite this way."

Margon burst out laughing, not loudly but in a very natural way. Yet he picked up the thread.

"I was their ruler for years," he conceded with a long sigh. "Their god, their king, their headman, whatever one wants to call it - I lived in utter harmony with them, and when the inevitable invaders came, I led the defense. I smelled evil as they smelled evil. I had to destroy it as they had to destroy it. The scent of the enemy evoked the change in me as it evoked the change in them. And so did the presence of evil in our midst.

"But I suffered a craving to punish that they did not suffer. I longed for the scent of the attacker and they never really did. I would have sought out the attacker in his own land for the thrill of destroying him, so irresistible to me was that scent, and the thrill of annihilating that supposed evil, that supposed cruelty, that threat. In sum, I would have produced aggression towards myself in order to declare it to be evil and destroy it."

"Of course," said Stuart.

"It was the king,s temptation," said Margon. "Perhaps it,s always the king,s temptation. I knew it. I, the first Homo sapiens sapiens who,d ever experienced the change.

"And so it is with us now. We can fly from the voices. We can come here to this great majestic forest and hope to save ourselves from the savagery within us but eventually we are tortured by our abstinence and we go to seek out the very evil we loathe."

"I follow you," said Stuart, nodding his head.

Reuben also nodded.

"So true," said Felix.

"And eventually we will seek it out," said Margon. "And in the meantime, we will hunt the forest because we can,t resist what the forest offers, can,t resist the simplicity of the slaughter that involves only brute inevitability rather than innocent blood."

"Did they induce the change in order to hunt?" asked Reuben. His head was teeming. He could taste the blood of the elk in his mouth, the elk, the soft-eyed beast who was not itself a killer, but food for killers. The brute inevitability, yes. The elk was not evil, had never been evil, had never carried the scent of evil, no.

"No," said Margon, "they did not. They hunted game without the change. But I was not the same as they were. And when the forest or the jungles called me, when the hunt called to me, I went into the change. I loved it. And these people marveled at it. They saw it as the god,s prerogative, but they never followed suit. They could not."

"And this was another surprise of the mutation," said Laura.

"Exactly," said Margon. "I was not what they were. I was something new." He paused and then went on with the story.

"Oh, I discovered many things in those months and years.

"I didn,t catch on at first that I couldn,t die. I,d seen that the tribesmen were nearly invulnerable in battle. Stab wounds, spear wounds, they almost always survived anything they were subjected to as long as the change was on them. And of course I shared this strange, inexplicable vigor. But I healed much more quickly from any wound sustained either during the wolf state or the man state, and I did not realize what this could mean.