Chapter 62: The Whisper in the Pack

It ended the way these things end, which is to say it ended badly and nobody won.

Ahern got between them with his case in his hand and his voice raised in a thing I had not heard before, a command that came out of him like a crack of ice, and the wolves on the headland stopped. Eileen's grey wolf stood on the track with her shoulder bleeding where Declan had taken her and her head down and her eyes on me, and the three men from the salvage crew were on the grass with their hands behind their heads because Ahern had told them what would happen to them if they moved.

Eileen shifted back. She stood on the track in her coat with her grey hair down and her hand pressed to her shoulder and she looked at Ahern and said, "You have my claim. I made it in front of you with a witness and I am going to make it again in that hall at nine o'clock and there is not a wolf in this village who can stop me."

"You are a banished wolf," Ahern said. "You cannot make a claim until the ban is lifted."

"Then lift it."

"That is for the co-op."

"Then I will stand at the door of the co-op until the co-op votes." Eileen looked at me. "And there is a thing about your sister that you do not know and that I am going to tell the co-op at nine o'clock. She was in the north with me for three weeks in April and she gave me the record of the shifts with her own hand and she told me she was going to take the seat and put me at her right hand. And then she went to Athlone and she hid in a cottage and she has been hiding ever since. A wolf who hides is a wolf who cannot hold a seat. The co-op will hear that and it will look at a woman from Dublin who has been in this village for a week and it will make its own mind up about who is fit."

She went down the north track with her two wolves and the salvage men went ahead of her with their hands still on their heads.

We came down off the headland at seven in the morning and the whole village was on the shore road.

Somebody had seen the lamps on the headland. Somebody had heard the wolves. By the time we came down the track there were forty wolves on the road with their coats on and their faces turned up and the word went along the road ahead of us like a wind. The woman from Dublin was on the headland with the enforcer. There was a fight. The Beta shifted. The woman from the north is here with a pack.

I went into the cottage and washed my face and my hands and put on my good black coat and came out again and the village was standing in the road.

Tom was at the front. Hannah was beside him with the baby. Nora was there and Eileen from the post office and Arthur with his stick and Leo who did not sleep. And they looked at me the way a village looks at a stranger who has brought trouble to its door.

"We have been hearing things all night," Tom said. "There is a woman from the north on the shore road with a pack of banished wolves and she says she has a claim and she says the Alpha is going to resign. And there is a woman from Dublin who pulled a safe out of a well and who has been digging in the church and who brought the enforcer down on us." He looked at me. "And there is a thing we have been told this morning that we cannot get out of our heads. They are saying your sister gave the record to the woman in the north. They are saying she was working for her all along."

"Who told you that?"

"Everybody has told us that. It came down the road at six o'clock from the north side and every wolf on this shore has heard it." Tom shifted his weight. "Niamh. We swore an oath in that garden because you stood in front of us and you told us you were one of us. And this morning there is a woman from the north with a claim and a pack and a story and there is a woman from Dublin with a notebook. And we do not know which of you is telling the truth."

I stood in the road with forty wolves looking at me.

"There is a thing I have not told you," I said. "And I am going to tell you now, in the road, in front of the whole village, because there is no time to do it any other way. My sister is in Athlone. She has been there since April. And I have not been to Athlone and I have not seen her and I do not know whether she is going to be on that shore road at nine o'clock. I sent a car and a driver at half past eleven last night and I have had no word since and there is no telephone in the cottage where she is staying." I looked at them. "So I am going to stand in that hall at nine o'clock and I am going to read the second charter and I am going to put the true ring on the table and I am going to ask for a vote. And if my sister is not there, then the co-op is going to have to decide whether a woman who has been in this village for a week and who has brought the law out of the ground is worth a vote."

The village did not move.

And then Hannah said, "Where is Declan?"

I turned round. Declan was not on the road. He had come down off the headland with us and he had gone into the harbor office with Ahern and Cormac and I had not seen him since.

"He is in the harbor office," I said.

"Then why is he not standing beside you?" Hannah shifted the baby. "You are his mate. The whole village knows it. There is a mark on his throat and a mark on yours and he stood on the headland this morning and shifted for you. So why is he in the harbor office with the enforcer and not in the road beside you?"

I stood in the road and looked at the harbor office and the light in the window.

"I do not know," I said.

I went down to the harbor office with the whole village watching me and I went up the stairs and opened the door.

Declan was at the desk with Ahern's case open in front of him and a paper in his hand and his face was grey.

"Say it," I said.

He put the paper down.

"Ahern has been through the file," he said. "The file from Galway. And there is a thing in it that I did not know and that no one in this village has known. My sister is not the only wolf who was taken out of this village in 1975. There was a second child. A boy. Born in the same year and taken out of the village in the same year and given to a family in the south." He looked up. "And the boy is in the file because he made a claim on a pack in the south in 1994 and the claim was refused and the file says he has been a rogue ever since. And his name is in the file and his name is in the parish record and his name is in the letter your sister wrote to Ronan in February."

I stood in the doorway.

"What is his name?" I said.

"His name is Korkut," Declan said. "The enforcer of this region. The man who has been taking money from this pack for eighteen years and who signed the sentence of the headland in March is the son of Deirdre and Fionn. He is my brother. And there is a thing in the file that is worse than that." He looked at me. "In 1994 he made a claim on a pack in the south and the claim was refused because the pack had a record of a wolf who had been banished from it in 1988. The wolf was a woman called Eileen. And the record says she was banished for the murder of a wolf called Deirdre in 1981."