Bad blood

Levent Kartal · 04-10-2012, 10:24 PM

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Levent was used to taking advantage of situations and people alike. He was cautious, but one couldn’t gather that from the ease he carried himself with. It was almost impossible to ruffle him, which was why he only crouched and waited with a small smile as the other butchered the carcass—rather than looking at the knife with suspicion. He wasn’t much of a fighter, but he was more or less confident of his skills with persuading others to stop trying to kill him, and escaping if need be. Much of his life had been spent wheedling and running—a cowardly way to live, some honorable wolves proclaimed, though most of those wolves were dead.

The dark wolf explained that his aunt, a former slave, had picked up on many languages and taught others in turn. It was intriguing, and the Turkish man wondered how many other tongues the stranger knew—fluently or not. Even he could only speak English and Turkish well, although he had a rudimentary understanding of the Arabic and Greek tongues, and of course the bastardized pidgin languages of trade and port cities.

“Bu mantıklı,” was all he said about the languages. And then, when the other offered his name, he broke into a broad smile. He chuckled under his breath, looking down at the grass, remembering the soft Greek-accented words murmured in his ear on starlit nights. “Death,” he purred, “son of Night and Darkness, brother to Sleep. A feared and hated character in the mythologies, ever present, but not a key character in any story. Unless you count Sisyphus making a fool of you.” He stretched his arms out then scratched behind a dark ear, smiling idly. “But he ended up trying to balance an unbalanceable rock, and here you are with a deer.”

It wasn’t often that he met a wolf named for one of the deities Agape spoke so fondly of, and perhaps it was dangerous to speak so familiarly with this stranger. Memories of his once-betrothed, no matter how badly it ended, did tend to make him warm and careless. He opened his mouth to ramble more, but a hiss grabbed his attention, and he heeded Wilson’s council for once. It was probably best not to talk Death’s ear off.

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