Sleeping Beast Ch. 10

His head snapped up.

She was playing with one of the two young wolves near the path that led down to the pass. There was a grove of spruce and hemlock there, and he could barely see her through layer upon layer of deep green and black needles, but every so often she'd dash around to his side. She was teasing the wolf with a kerchief, fluttering it in front of his nose until he leapt, when she'd jerk it away and dart sideways to let the creature chase her again.

The wolf. To let the WOLF chase her. Talgut muttered a curse.

The wolf was wagging its tail and yipping in glee, as happy and carefree as Troi.

Talgut glanced down at the decimated potato plants once more time, cursed again, and went inside.

--:--

When Troi returned, Talgut was waiting in her room. He nudged her smoothly away from the door and leaned back against it to block her exit.

She glared and turned away without speaking.

Talgut remained calm. "It is time we talk. After we have our discussion, I will leave you to your own company, but until then, I will stay here." He folded his arms while she continued to glare.

Finally conceding defeat, Troi slumped into a chair near the hearth.

Talgut remained standing because he knew she wouldn't hesitate to trick him and run. He prompted her. "You are upset because-?"

She looked up incredulously.

"I am furious," she corrected, "and confused," she allowed, "because I've discovered my family is a trio of lying, cruel, amoral cretins."

Talgut had to bite back a grin. It was so essentially Troi to know a word like "cretin" in a language she hadn't learned until she was nearly grown.

"How do any of you differ from the men who killed my family and sold me into a life of slavery?"

Talgut's shoulders tensed and he altogether lost the urge to grin.

"I was beaten for five years for no reason. I was used--"

Talgut interrupted her. "Argus and Nivid didn't do any of those things, Troi. That was other men. Not these men."

"But you did exactly--"

"No. Not 'exactly'."

"None of you even blinked when you spoke of taking those women, raping them, ruining their lives, after they'd watched their families being slaughtered in the pass. You don't care! They're just women, just slaves, whores who don't matter to anyone! Just like me!"

She was weeping again, and well on her way to hysteria, Talgut saw.

He was torn between sighing and slapping her, but he did neither. With her upper arm firmly encased in one wide fist, he pushed her from the room. Down the hall and around the corner they went, all the way to the castle's formal dining room, which had become a hold-all for discarded furniture and despised mice. Talgut threaded through the maze of tables and chairs to a tapestry-covered wall, where he twitched a hidden cord from a nearly-invisible groove between the wall and mantle. As Troi gaped, her sobs forgotten, he pulled down, hand over hand, and the tapestry rolled up, revealing a pair of gilded double doors, set with mirrors, top and bottom.

Troi didn't see it-- she was still too busy staring at the ornate doors, wondering what secret lay beyond-- but Talgut must have secured the cord. With his hands on her shoulders, he gave her body two sharp jerks, snapping her head uncomfortably two and fro and startling Troi from her absorption.

"ENOUGH!" He bellowed the word near her ear, close enough to make Troi flinch, and went on with only a touch less power. "Look at you! You are pathetic! You are a strong Bashkir woman acting like a pasty Russian princess too delicate to milk her own goats!"

Troi looked at the mirrors as he bade her, and didn't like the sight. Her dress was clean but horribly rumpled, she hadn't combed her hair in days, and her face was puffy and tear-stained. She looked awful, and her eyes leapt eagerly away to meet Talgut's as he continued berating her.

"Your parents are dead! So are mine! So are Nivid's! Your sisters were killed? Mine, too! How would your mother and your sisters see you now? Hiding in your room, playing wolf-games while your garden withers, your friend dies, and your man lies wounded and unconscious in a cave! Shame on you!"

Troi was whiter than the pasty Russian princess by then, feeling just what he'd meant her to feel. Her eyes darted away from his, and she put her hands on her stomach which rolled and heaved beneath her skin. From deep in her bones, tremors shook her body.

Talgut was right. Her behavior had shamed her family.

She didn't have the strength to lift her eyes from the dust-covered carpet as she examined her actions. Deep within, some part of her had already recognized the mistake she'd made in judging her men so harshly. Talgut was merely forcing her to face the truth.

He prodded Troi sideways, into a chair nearly as big as Nivid's, where she sat motionless, her feet dangling above the carpet.

"Now," he said, more quietly, "are you listening?"

With a small movement, she answered his question.

"I will tell you the truth of the Denovas, something they would not wish for you to hear. They would not forgive me, but if you decide to inform them, so be it." He nodded once, sharply, as punctuation, then folded his arms across his chest and leaned back against the window ledge to tell the story.

"I'm sure you've heard how Nivid found me in the taiga, treed by the pack, and brought me here. For the better part of a year, I couldn't open my mouth to speak for fear of screaming, but they fed me, nurtured me, and taught me how to be a man again. Both of them. Nivid tried to stay away, but I began to follow him when he hunted, and he finally gave in. He taught me to track and make traps. I'd-- forgotten a lot of what I learned--"

He backhanded the uncomfortable thought away. "What they don't mention is that when I came here, the two of them were also a mess, not that much older than me, and as alone in the world as I. When I was well, I saw this. Years later Argus told me that caring for me had helped; he didn't believe they would have made it through another winter without a reason to survive. For good or ill, caring for a broken boy gave them that reason."

Talgut stopped, as though gauging how much to say, and Troi saw the moment he gave in, the ear tipping toward his shoulder, the pursed grimace and long slow blink, and she knew she'd hear everything. She swallowed.

"After Arvid and Suvi Denova died-- an' I haven't told the boys this, but I believe they were deliberately killed-- they were left on their own. They were just kids, Troi, sixteen, eighteen years old, 'bout there somewhere. Argus was in another body-- no longer a child, but an aging, aching, alcoholic man, a man Nivid sometimes didn't recognize when he was in a fever or a killing rage. Argus got hurt more'n once trying to stop Nivid from doing something awful. Nivid would come out of it after a week or so, begging Argus to kill him, to make him stop."

The corners of his mouth turned down as he glanced at her.

"Nivid did his best to keep it away from Argus, but some things are difficult to hide, and the urges he had, well. . .. When old Arvid was alive, he'd been locking the boy up during his worst times and throw a critter in there once in a while, which, in my opinion, didn't do much toward teachin' his son to control what the curse had done."

"Argus made up for some of it, went hunting with Nivid, herding game toward him-- baiting bears and running away so the bear would run right into Nivid!" He laughed shortly. "As long as he was hunting and fighting regular, Nivid was mostly sane, three weeks out of four, anyway. He knew what he was, and he tried-- for years-- to resist the urges of the curse, but he's a wild animal, and the only way the creature can stay in control is to hunt, to kill things, and to take women. If he doesn't, he'll lose himself, end up in some village slaying every man, woman, and child. No matter what he did, he couldn't hide that truth from his little brother.

"Argus, too, did his best: he could see the rages coming and tried getting whores up here, thought he'd blindfold them. No one would agree to it, of course." Talgut shook his head. "I don't know everything, and I think they've forgotten parts, too, maybe by choice, but I've put most of it together since then, I guess.

"Every month, Argus would lock Nivid in a room with some food and water, go off somewhere to find a whore, drug her, and ferry her up here in the back of the old wagon-- this was before, when they still had a couple of horses around the place. He'd keep her drugged the whole time . . . while . . . well . . .."

Talgut stopped abruptly, and his olive skin darkened. His embarrassment might have amused Troi-- after all, she'd been captured to serve the same purpose-- but nothing was funny right then.

Talgut cleared his throat and began again. "Afterwards, he'd drop her at a church or nunnery, with more than enough money to pay for her care. He planned to keep doing that, but the drugs he was using . . . well, two of the women died, and he went back to keeping Nivid locked up."

Talgut shook his head some more, staring at the rug with a grim expression. "I'll tell you, Troi, it was killing him. It was killing Nivid, too. A few times he got out, and when the fever passed, he remembered some of what he did. He'll say he's nothing but a beast, but it's not true, and the man underneath the fur and horns . . .."

Talgut straightened away from the window ledge, put his hands in his pockets, and paced while he told her the rest. "I heard him, so many times, when he was going into or coming out of those fevers, telling Argus to kill him. Not begging, but ordering . . . howling the words until he had no words left. Then down the mountain Argus would go. He hated it, hated what he was doing. It was killing him, but he couldn't bear to take his brother's life. When I got better, I started paying attention, and a few months later Nivid was telling me the same things.

"I don't know if Argus heard him, or if he just knew it'd happen eventually, but the next time Nivid started to go down bad, Argus took me for a stroll to the old armory. There's more metal in that room than I'd ever seen in one place." Talgut's astonishment shone through in his aside. "He showed me which bits and pieces were always kept sharp, cut his finger on one big blade-- on purpose, I think-- then stood there staring at the cut, smearing the blood around with his thumb. He told me when I gave in and killed Nivid, I was to do it at night when he was sleeping, then go straight to Argus' room and kill him, too."

He stopped and met her eyes, and Troi saw all the horror that the man-child Talgut had felt back then.

"I said I wouldn't, but he hauled me around the place, showing me where all the gems and gold were hidden, told me if I was careful and went north or south for supplies, I should be able to live in the castle for a long time after they were dead. He got some poison, too, from an apothecary somewhere, said that might be easier on me.

"I told him over and over I wouldn't do it, but Argus insisted. Kept saying he could see I was an honorable man, and eventually I wouldn't be able to tolerate the knowledge of what they'd done. I'd be right to kill them, and it would be the merciful thing for them, too." He stopped, looking out the window into the dark years of his past.

"I'll tell you, Troi, I thought about it. Not because I was a decent man, like Argus said, but the kind of pain they were in--" Another head-shake. "Well, I didn't, as you can see, but it wasn't to save them, it was to save me. This was the only home I had. They were my family."

His face hardened and his eyes landed solidly on Troi's face, where they stayed. "So, when you're looking for someone to blame for what's happened since then, it's me. I'm the one who started taking women again, and twenty years ago, I built that bench we tied them onto. I knew some herbs, too, so for the first couple of years, we gave Nivid some tea durin' the fevers to slow him down-- so he wouldn't hurt anyone by accident. An' I'm the one who came up with the idea of paying them off, to help the boys feel better about it.

"I did all that, Troi. I did it to save myself."

" 'S far as the women go, we aren't perfect, but me n' Argus do our best. If we can't get a workin' girl, we get a poor, married one with a rotten husband. They aren't hard to find: men drinking in the middle of the day, wife slinkin' around next to the walls. We never take a woman with a child at home-- an' I never heard one complain about it, either, so I think we did good on that. We never took a woman who smiled when her man came in the door, and we've never taken a girl, or an unmarried female of any age."

Talgut took time to emphasize that point. "No woman ever lost her innocence on that bench, Troi."

After a pause, he went on. "I don't pretend this makes what we do acceptable, but neither of us can kill him, and the curse stops Nivid from doing it himself. There's been no other choice. And you can blame me for it, not them. They weren't innocent when I took over, but Nivid can't help what he is, and Argus-- Argus was selling his soul each and every time he went down that mountain, and he was doing it to save his brother. If you want to damn him for that--"

Troi interrupted, the first sound she'd made since he put her in the chair. "What about your soul, Talgut?"

He looked away before he answered, in a voice hardened by lack of expression. "I'm different."

"In what way?"

He shook his head, and turned around to stare out the window. "It doesn't matter. I-- it doesn't matter."

Troi clambered out of the chair and went to stand by his side. Even at that proximity, Talgut's face was blank and unenlightening. Very lightly, she laid a hand on his shoulder. Talgut winced, but didn't object, and she left it there. "You might believe you did it to save yourself-- maybe you did-- but you said Nivid and Argus were family. Well, you're my family, too, and I'm asking. What about you-- your soul?"

With a sudden jerk, he turned toward her, eyes burning as he capitulated, though his voice was steady. "I don't believe anything we do has any effect on what will happen to us tomorrow, Troi. The gods decreed I should be here, stealing women for the Denova brothers. The gods decreed the women should be here, too, and that you should come. Nothing I do will change those things. I go along with your plan to save them because I could be wrong. Mayhap you can fix this. Mayhap your gods have not deserted you. Mayhap Bashkir gods still care about their children."

Troi wondered if Talgut used "children" to mean mankind, but something deep in her belly said he'd been referring to himself. She patted him once on the shoulder before she turned to walk away, murmuring, "I'm going for a walk, but I will stay inside the castle."

--:--:-- o --:--:--

Instead of carrying her in ambling circles, Troi's feet took her directly to the tower room, where she ensconced herself in Nivid's giant chair. Leaning her head back against the soft doeskin, she petted the bits beneath her fingertips and tried to imagine him insane, locked in a cell by a father who tossed him sheep and believed he'd done his duty.

For the first few days after her epiphany and Nivid's departure, Troi had hardly known the reason for her tears. She'd been subject to such a plethora of confusing and contradictory emotions, she'd sometimes felt as though she might indeed be possessed. In the time required to roll and tumble from her bed each morning, her heart swung from anger to regret to sadness to fear and back to fury again. Intellect fared no better than emotion, as her mind argued first that her current family was innocent of harm and, then, that they were as guilty as those who'd taken her from her parents' care. She didn't know what to think, what to feel, or what to do, and none of Troi's gods had been inclined to answer her questions.

For all the years of her captivity, she'd buried her grief and horror as she was brutalized, over and over.

She still hadn't come to terms with being abducted from her family when she was kidnapped again and brought here, but she'd come to see the truth in what Argus had told her on the clifftop: any peaceful place would have seemed like heaven to her after what she'd endured. The thoughts she'd repressed for the sake of her survival had initially been drowned in the burgeoning happiness of being safe and loved, but all at once, they'd settled around her like a cloak of tar.

Troi blinked, realizing that her eyes were dry.

She'd been crying for . . . what? . . . five days now? and she didn't feel any better, but this was the first time since she was taken that she'd allowed herself to weep for her family, and she supposed one day for each year since they died was a nominal price to pay.

Her mind went back to Talgut's story. She'd been distraught when first they spoke, but she'd already seen, days ago, that the men at Zamok Denova were not like the men who killed her family. Those men captured women for coin, and cared naught for anything else. Troi's head was clear enough now to see the difference-- the men here were not like that-- but she hadn't been able to let go of her anger.

She understood the decisions they'd been forced to make, but that was then. Now . . . now what . . .? Now . . ..

Troi petted the doeskin chair and watched squares of sunlight marking time on the wall, as she pulled threads from Talgut's story, examining each in turn. She hated each and every strand but couldn't find one spot at which she could say the men were evil or malicious or even uncaring. So why did this still bother her so much? Why did thinking of those women feel like a burning awl burying itself in the place behind her eyes? All those women . . ..

Her head came up off the chair. No. Not all of the women. The thoughts which made her eyes burn and her stomach heave were not about all the women-- they were about the women in the pass. The women like Troi.

Her head fell back against the chair, but the tension didn't leave her body, and her fingers remained still on the buttery leather. Against her will, she turned to stare at Nivid's big feather bed, her mind drifting away from the painful subject. What had Talgut said . . . he'd said the garden was dying, no, her friend was dying, and her man--

Troi was on her feet before she knew it, flying down around the tower stairs.

What was wrong with Nivid?

She was supposed to be helping them! Hadn't she sewn all those amulets into boots and belts and collars to protect them? Now he was . . . where??

What had happened to Nivid?

The kitchen was empty, the drawing room deserted, she'd check his bedroom and then start at the top, work her way down, maybe ringing a cowbell would . . . she was at Argus' door, banging furiously before she finished the thought. Unable to wait, she threw it open and ran straight into his arms. Part of her noticed he was wearing drawers and nothing else, and he was too thin, but she didn't care about the first and couldn't do anything about the second at that precise moment.

"Troi, what--"

"Where's Nivid? Talgut said-- Talgut said-- I don't remember what he said-- but is something wrong with Nivid? Where is he?"

Still holding her arms, Argus sighed. Gently he turned her around and led her to an upholstered chaise by the window. He moved the book he'd been reading so she had a place to perch. And perch she did, on the very edge of the cushion, nearly vibrating, her eyes feverish and shiny.

She leapt up as he turned away. "Argus!"

"Sit," he ordered over his shoulder. "Let me get a dressing gown first, and I'll answer your question."