Chapter 11

We left town after three days of partying. The 50 gold coins were used up in party expenses, but we had a ball while it lasted. We got out before any open animosity developed between us and the town fathers; they weren't all that evil, I just didn't like them and their holier-than-thou attitude.

I felt no particular urge to travel in any specific direction, so we headed south to escape the cold weather coming with winter. I had heard that the weather was perpetually warm a few hundred miles farther south, but I couldn't get any details beyond that.

Big Noise was growing fast, and I had warned him that he would morph into a wolf one day in the next few years. I reminded him that he would wake up one morning in the shape of a wolf, but he shouldn't panic. When that happened, he must come to me and I will provide him with one of the magic amulets that would let him shape shift any time he wanted to. He nodded that he understood, but I figured that he would panic and forget the first time it happened. Oh, well, we all have to learn the best way we can.

On several occasions, I asked Big Noise how he felt about that name and if he wanted to change it. He said that he had gotten used to it and kind of liked it, so he did not really want to change. If he was happy, the rest of the family was happy, so we let him do as he liked with it.

I had spoken to Holly about her change into a wolf when she became a woman. I had the feeling that the transition to the morphing ability for a female came with her start of menstruation. If that was the case, Holly might actually be able to transition before Big Noise could, so I wanted her to understand that she was not stuck with the change when she shifted to wolf form the first time. I told her that she could have an amulet as soon as she needed one; she didn't have to wait until her 13^th birthday if she needed it before then. She claimed that she understood, and I believed her, so I let the matter drop.

We had progressed as far as the great plain northwest of the Black Sea and were not making a very fast trip. There were no roads through here, so we had to depend on whatever we could find in the natural ground configuration. The rivers often slowed us down, but we managed to get across without losing anything or anybody, though it was a close call on occasion. The Danube River gave us the most problem due to its sheer size, but even that bowed to our stubbornness.

We encountered some fierce creatures through here, both human and not human. On one occasion we actually did meet some half-man/half-horse creatures. Once I got a good look at them, I could easily see the differences between them and the looks of men on horses, but I could see how it could be confusing to somebody who was seeing them for the first time. We found them to be intelligent, but impulsive, creatures who could go from friendly to surly at the drop of an accidental slur. They had some odd prejudices, so we had problems understanding them sometimes, but, over all, we got along pretty well. It seems that they did not get along well with wolves, so we had to be careful in our morphing while we were in their territory.

When we got a little farther south we met our first griffins. These creatures were about the size of a large horse and had the appearance of a combination of an eagle in the front and a lion in the rear. They were reputed to guard gold mines and buried treasure, but we had no trouble with them since we were not interested in either one. There was a slight resemblance to a dragon if you had a good imagination.

We did run into trouble with the lions of the region. They were a little larger than us in our wolf form, and they seemed to be perpetually hungry. At least, that was the impression they gave, since they were constantly after our horses. I think that they would have been after us, too, if we had given them the chance. Fortunately, these lions usually were solitary hunters, so we could defend our horses as a pack of wolves and kill the lions or drive them off.

We usually had one person drive the cart, while the rest of us patrolled in our wolf form to take advantage of our more sensitive senses. Odor was usually the way we spotted a lion; they had a strong and distinctive odor which we could spot from some distance away. Thus, we could usually head off a lion before it got close enough to our cart to frighten the horses.

A typical encounter would involve one of us sensing a lion and howling a warning to summon the rest of the pack. We would form a U-shaped wall with our bodies with the opening facing the way we wanted the lion to move. Four oversize wolves were usually enough to intimidate a lion into remembering an urgent appointment in another location. If a lion refused to take the hint, it was easy to rip out its throat. It couldn't hurt us, so we were never reluctant to attack when it was appropriate.

Our first experience with iron weapons on a large scale was with the Hittites. They had just begun to use iron for weapons and the army use a mixture of iron and bronze swords. We had stopped at a checkpoint on the trail heading south, and Orda attracted the amorous attention of one of the guards. We all happened to be in our human form at the time, and the guards decided that four women were just too many for a single man.

There were six guards, and they all decided that rape would be a fun way to spend the day, after the children and I were dead, of course. Two men grabbed the halters of the horses while the rest pulled our their swords and casually walked toward us. They did not expect us to defend ourselves, since they could not see any weapons in evidence.

One of them grabbed Orda's arm and pulled her from the cart. Big Noise didn't appreciate his mother being treated this way, so he jumped at the guard to defend Orda. With a simple flick of his wrist, he decapitated Big Noise. This stunned all of us, since our previous experience had been that weapons did us no harm. Orda recovered her senses first, possibly because Big Noise was her child, but, whatever the reason, she morphed into a werewolf and bit down on the guard's arm as hard as she could. This severed the arm holding her foreleg, but did nothing to prevent him from stabbing her in the belly with his iron sword.

Orda howled in pain and collapsed at the guard's feet. Meanwhile, the guard was trying to staunch the flow of blood from his severed arm, so he was out of the fight. The rest of us morphed and attacked the guards. Three of the guards went down with vital sections of their throats missing. This left unharmed the two holding the horses, but not for long. I went after one of them and Jonga went after the other. Instead of running as we expected, these men drew their swords and stood back to back to defend themselves.

Trudy was scouting to be sure these six were the only enemies we had to deal with, which left the other two to Jonga and me. She faked a leap for her man's throat, and he raised his sword to defend that part of his body. As soon as he did that, she ripped open his gut, spilling his internal organs to the dirt. The man screamed and distracted his partner, giving me the opening I needed to rip out his throat.

A moment later, Trudy came in with a report that there were no more Hittites in the area. Now that the battle was over, I changed back into my human form and picked up one of the swords to examine it. So this was an iron weapon that we had to be wary of? Except for its color, it looked like the bronze and copper swords we had already seen. Well, I guess we needed to be more careful when we saw weapons of an unusual color.

Orda had recovered from her wound by now and was bending over Big Noise. She picked up his severed head and positioned it in the proper place on his shoulders. His werewolf abilities took over and the head reattached. It took nearly 30 minutes for all of the reattachments to be completed, but, by then, Big Noise was regaining consciousness, though he complained of a sore throat. Orda gathered him in her arms and cried, Big Noise couldn't figure out why she was so upset, since he had not seen the blow which chopped off his head.