The Silver Wolf Read Online Free PDF

not have been too bad if she’d been intelligent, kind, or even hardworking and well-intentioned. She was none of those. When she was not sleeping in her alcove off the main room or being violently and noisily ridden by Hugo, she joined with him in harassing Regeane.
    As her mother had done, Regeane tried to bring some measure of order into their lives. She took over the chores Gisela had once performed. She did her best to stretch the little money they had. She cooked simple one-pot meals for the four of them, saw to the washing when she could persuade Gundabald to pay the washerwoman, and helped the old woman—Regeane never knew her name and always thought of her as “the old woman”—clean up after the other three.
    The old woman was the only one who could get any work out of Silve. She accused her of such vile obscenities that Silve,afraid to attack her, would be so galvanized by rage that she scrubbed and washed with a will.
    In her spare time, Regeane would retreat to her narrow room and, with cold, numb fingers, try to put her scanty wardrobe in order. She had no decent sewing needles. The few she had were made of bone and their points blunted quickly. She had no thread so she unraveled rags to get enough thread to alter her dresses.
    Her mother had been buried in her one good mantle and gown. Regeane had seen to that, even though Gundabald and Hugo cursed her for a fool, saying Gisela wouldn’t need warm clothes where she was going, only a winding sheet. What remained of both her mother’s and her wardrobes was shabby beyond belief.
    Regeane accepted the situation. Most women had the same problem. Cloth was expensive. With a loom, she could have woven her own, but a loom was a large, costly piece of equipment. Few families had access to one, so women spent their time often as not resewing what few clothes they had, trying to decently cover their nakedness.
    As autumn slowly wore into winter, Regeane’s despair deepened. The lodging house was part of an old ruin. Even the proprietor had no idea of the purpose it once served. The icy winter wind sobbed and moaned through the stone rooms by day and by night. A charcoal brazier heated the air for only a few inches around the coals. The walls and floors remained bitterly cold to the touch.
    Gundabald and Hugo were more than happy to eat the food Regeane prepared, though they denigrated it as coarse peasant fare. They scattered bones under the table, spat gristle on the floor. When they pissed, they missed the pot and left reeking yellow puddles everywhere. After eating, Gundabald wandered off to a tavern in search of further entertainment.
    Hugo and Silve went to bed and exercised the webbing under the mattress. They fucked each other blind, drank themselves incapable, then into a sodden coma.
    Gundabald usually returned in the small hours and—depending on his luck with the dice box, boys, or women—he might or might not wake Silve and Hugo and chase them ‘roundand ‘round the room, flogging their screaming, naked bodies with his leather belt. The landlord’s fury usually put an end to these entertainments, whereupon they all retired.
    In the morning, someone would wake early, usually Silve—she was most easily ejected from a warm bed—would open Regeane’s door so she could come out and clean up the mess.
    To compound Regeane’s problems, the rain moved in.
    The wolf loved it. The winds moving through the city blew the human stench away. Freshets swelled the Tiber, flushing out the raw sewage seeping into the river. Downpours cleansed cobblestones and walls. Briefly, in the watery winter sun, the city became a place of light and color. Marble gleamed. Orange stucco walls glowed. Long wands of red valerian grew in brickwork, and crumbling pediments waved red and pink banners against the cloudy gray sky.
    The Romans loved flowers. Window boxes and pots on balconies flamed with late blooming blue sage, golden yarrow, fragrant dusty white chamomile, and