Plenilune (73 page)

“Oh, so?” said Dammerung. “Towns and peoples are not so unlike the whole world over. I will make note of the way-house. Hallo!” he called back over his shoulder. “You’re to go on to the way-house by the dyers’ shop: it sports a red cloth so that the Hebrews will not miss you.”

“The sheriff’s building is just here,” murmured Aikin, gesturing to a tall wooden building set off the sidewalk.

They parted; Margaret watched Aikaterine go with obvious misgivings on the maid’s part, though Huw Daggerman, since the evening with the old apple-leaf woman, had been nothing but respectfully courteous. She watched them mingle with the street traffic from where she stood on the sidewalk, then turned to follow Dammerung—only to nearly run into him, for he, too, had stopped, and was laughing silently after Aikaterine’s prim, metal-plated back. He caught Margaret’s eye, shared the humour, and then neatly dodged a mother and child, crossed the sidewalk, and was halfway up the wooden staircase of the High Sheriff’s building in two bounds. Aikin beckoned an “after you;” hauling on her rough aubergine-coloured skirts, running fast to avoid the thick sidewalk traffic, Margaret shimmied up after Dammerung as he reached the top and landed two hard thumps on the worn shell-coloured door.

There was a pause. Aikin pushed off his hood and ran his fingers through his hair to reawaken its natural liveliness; after another moment, he took the time to scrape his boots off on the edge of the top stair riser.

“Should we—” began Margaret, peering at the two-story window on a level with them and thinking the place looked like a public building.

“Hark! the host advances!” Dammerung interrupted: the sound of boots on a wooden floor echoed in the room beyond. The latch rattled and the door swung inward.

“Better late than never,” said a man’s voice, “but if you expect me to boil a lamb-shank at this time of—oh.” A middle-aged, sandy-haired fellow who could have gone shoulder to shoulder with Skander and have given Capys a run for his money stopped in the middle of his sentence and his doorway and looked, obviously surprised, on the three of them. Only for a moment, then he regathered himself. “That boy is very late.”

“What, the groceries?” Dammerung chimed. “Quite.”

The Sheriff’s gaze fixed on Aikin with a light of recognition. “Hallo! Good evening! Never mind the lamb-shank—please, come in.” He stood back, pushing aside a long bench on which, Margaret was sure, many errant bottoms had sat, and motioned them in. “This was unexpected, my Lord Aikin. Word through the grape vine was that you were in Darkling.”

Aikin slung off his cloak and reached to take Margaret’s. “Not so far as that, good sir. We were but in Hol-land easing the tension on Darkling’s borders. Word came that our father was in some need of assistance here; we saw signs of battle on the way.”

The Sheriff nodded gravely. “That was a week ago. Rupert de la Mare landed west of us and pushed eastward, very nearly into Tarnjewel, when my Lord Gro returned: he and Capys managed to shove the bulk of de la Mare’s force northwestward, out of our hair.”

“And your pasturelands,” mused Dammerung. He had strolled to the window and was looking down into the street.

The Sheriff turned at the sound of his voice. “Forgive me for a man’s shot in the dark. You must be the War-wolf.”

“Today I must.” The pale blue eyes swung and glinted in the level light. “Tomorrow too, perhaps. Later I will be someone else.”

The Sheriff’s brow said, “What?” and his eyes cut across to Aikin with a look that said clearly, “Dost deal with a mad man, my lord?”

But Dammerung pushed off from the window sill and came back into the middle of the room, his head back, his eyes coursing over the Sheriff’s face. “You must forgive me, though I never shoot in the dark. I think you fall on my side of the fence.”

“Summerlin is a good man and true,” Aikin vouched.

“But perhaps,” the Sheriff added, “the War-wolf should be the judge of that.”

A brief, genuine smile thrust up from Margaret’s heart-place onto her face; she turned her head to hide it, for as soundly as she was liking the Sheriff, she saw the man was in earnest.

“I am usually my own judge, but what I hear and smell of you rings fair about the metal Aikin Ironside has staked for you. A clean toss. Now for the news, for I am a cat for news: can you give me FitzDraco’s and Capys’ whereabouts?”

The Sheriff had been pleased at first with Dammerung’s obvious approval—Margaret knew that feeling, of being swept up into a rich warm inside place that was at once still as a wood and crackling with latent energy—but upon Dammerung’s prying the rough tawny smile stiffened and Margaret saw the fair eyes flash, for an instant, for a way out. Her heart leapt forward in her chest like a tomcat on the defence.

“Well—” He began by turning up the hem of his official tunic and digging his hands into the pockets of his corduroys. “Last I knew for certain, which was three nights ago, Capys engaged in a full-out battle with Locklear on Helming Side.”

“That’s good down country,” Aikin interjected.

Dammerung noted it with a twitch of his brow.

“I think Capys had the better of it and put the flower of de la Mare’s army to by. I heard he chased the remnants clear to Oaksgate and they fought in the streets from house to house until they cornered the stiffest of the foe in the forum. Nigh burnt the place down, too, I hear, and it dates back some hundred years, but I am told Capys managed to stamp out the fire and the foe at once.”

“The Capys come of big-footed stock,” said the famous All Hallows’ smile.

Summerlin laughed shortly, awkwardly, as if he felt a jest in Dammerung’s words but could not be privy to it. “That was the upshot of it, but as is a matter of course handfuls of men got shaved off the dark on the way to Oaksgate and are making nuisances of themselves in the countryside. I have many of my men out on Long Patrol sweeping for errant soldiers and my Lord Gro—” he hesitated again. “My Lord Gro has gone back to Gemeren where he is in state now, overseeing his domestic affairs.”

He got the last out in a dead-level voice, looking Dammerung squarely in the eye, but Margaret felt him bracing for impact. But whatever it was he expected Dammerung to give him, Dammerung did not play into his hand. The War-wolf seemed to think a moment, pinning up thoughts between Summerlin’s eyebrows, looking at them, taking them back down and exchanging them for others. He took hardly a minute before he said,

“I expect Capys would be in Aloisse-gang, then, or very near it: perhaps south of it in that rather bonny bit of glen.”

“Oh, you have been to Aloisse-gang?” Aikin turned to Dammerung, pleasantly surprised.

“Once, about four years ago.”

Aikin smiled regretfully. “Then you had only ravens, I think, for company. I have been meaning to overhaul the place and make it habitable again as soon as I find a skirt-train that strikes my abiding fancy.”

A knock at the door called them up short. Instinctively Margaret took a step toward the door before she remembered it was not her house. In an attempt to recover her dignity she stepped in behind Dammerung as if that had always been her intent.

Her movement caught Summerlin’s eye. “Excuse my lack of manners!” he exclaimed, making a few strides at the same time for the door. “My lady, we have not been introduced. I do not have the pleasure of knowing whose fair presence I am in.”

She cursed pleasantly inside as she coloured under the buttering of his compliments. Saving her, Dammerung said, as if it were an idle thing, “This is the Lady Margaret—I see you have heard of her—and that must be your lamb-shank. From dust we came and to dust we shall return, but the sweet aroma of lamb-shank shall endure forever. We had better leave you to your supper and get on to ours.”

They took a warm leave of Summerlin—very mocking on Dammerung’s part, Margaret thought, and very respectful and perplexed on the Sheriff’s—jostled with the grocery boy—who gawked at Aikin Ironside and gawked still more at Dammerung, and seemed to wholly forget himself when Margaret, sucking in her breath, squeezed past him in the narrow doorway—and finally plunged back out into the swimming golden light of the evening street.

“Why,” asked Margaret when the door was safely shut behind them and the crash of the street damped any threat of being overheard, “was the Sheriff so worried about Lord Gro? For a moment I was really quite worried myself that something bad had become of him, or that he had done something bad himself.”

Aikin’s face was closed; he looked very studiously for his stirrup and jammed his foot into it. But Dammerung turned at Mausoleum’s side, fingers linked to give Margaret a boost, and admitted roundly, “He had a right to be worried! A man doesn’t pack up and trot home in the middle of a war. They have a fine and bitter word for that.”

Desertion.
The word moved like a little cold worm in her stomach.
But not Lord Gro, surely—!

“Only, as much as Bloodburn likes to knock it—hoo-oof! up you get! put on some weight, woman?—I take a draft of mercy with my tonic of justice. We fight for Plenilune’s right to live: what Gro does today is fighting for her life itself.” Dammerung fetched up her reins. “He knows as well as I that the ploughing and crops must be seen to or we’ll have naught to go back to when once we’ve laid down our swords.”

When once we have laid down our swords
. That seemed a long, dark time off to Margaret. With the heavy sense of a realist she jabbed at her stirrups and put her feet in.

“Aikin,” said Dammerung, “I think you and Brand and Margaret and I ought to trot down to Gemeren and collect Gro while the rest go on ahead. I would be remiss to be in the neighbourhood and not pay my respects to Herluin.”

Hannibal lay close under the Westphell overlooks and as it was growing late in the swimming, gold-shot evening, much of the street was plunged in shadow, topped by the timber houses and the metallic clang of electrum sky. Everything was a moving confusion of deep brown shadow, blue steam, and a high brilliant light. On horseback, high above the press, the three of them occasionally passed through shards of sunlight which were still streaming over the felltop and down the lanes between the buildings. When they passed into the light it was like being caught up in some other world entirely, a world in which the air was gold and every drifting speck of dirt or feather was made of glass and silver and the manes of the horses were made of thin-pulled copper. Margaret felt tired and sore and not at all beautiful, but looking at her companions in the light her heart lifted, for the light made them very fair and terrible, as if they wore all normal lights and shadows as cloaks over their splendour, and the late witching light of evening, level and strong, cut through their disguises and showed them up proud and powerful, their brown hair cast copper like the horses’ manes, their angular faces sharpened and yet strangely distant. Their eyes were hard to see, for they narrowed them against the glare; it was only that, Margaret thought, which kept them from being overwhelming in appearance.

The red length of cloth at the dyers’ shop called out to them over the milling crowd. They were almost under the sign of the way-house before Margaret could pick it out from the urban backdrop. With a duck and a twist in the saddle Dammerung turned in to the way-house yard, under the low stockade lintel of the yard doors, and gave Rubico his head. Margaret felt her horse pick up its feet a little as the scent of hay and oats sang out with a kind of candle-colour in the gloom. Margaret had hope of a little supper before pushing on; earnest as he could be in order and battle among his men, Dammerung was very particular about food—though she did not know if that was wholly for the sake of his men or if two years starvation in the wine-cellar had given him an involuntary flinch at the thought of going forcibly without a meal.

He helped her down onto the way-house porch and untangled Mausoleum’s reins from her fingers. “I’ll mind him,” he said, the shadow of the building on his face and the sharp-cut slice of gold that was the side of Westphell shimmering like a kind of moon behind his head. “Tell the others, if they haven’t already, to order a bowl to go round.”

“Stew or punch?” she mocked.

Dammerung hauled Mausoleum away. “Both, if we could spare the money, which we can’t.”

“I’ll rout out their cook for a bite, then,” she called, and, turning, pushed open the heavy-lidded old door of the establishment. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, then she saw the familiar figure of Brand rising from the settle by the fire, tall and barley-crested with the fire at his back casting his face in shadow as he came toward her. Several of the others looked round as he passed and saw her in the doorway. How familiar they all were! she thought with a sudden, inexplicable pain. How blunt and unlovely and covered in flying muck and stubble—and
familiar!
The image of the room seemed so close and tangible that she felt she could reach out and hold its warm red roundness in her hands, as Dammerung held them all like fine golden balls. Was that what he felt? she wondered. Was everything to him small and round and fragile, cupped in one hand to be broken like an egg or treasured as he willed?

Brand the Hammer loomed over her. “Have we our marching orders?”

She blinked and came back to him. “Yes. You and Aikin and Dammerung and I are pushing on for Gemeren where we are to collect Lord Gro. The rest go on to Eastphell to rejoin Capys.”

Brand’s face opened with a boyish pleasure. “I had hoped that might be the way of it…Come have a drink with us before we leave. Are you hungry? Capys’ maid Aikaterine took the liberty of ordering some supper.”

She went, and they set her down between Aikaterine and Huw on the settle—it was a narrow seat, and she had to ram her feet against the floorboards to keep from slipping off—and handed her a horn cup of perry that was light and chilled but made the blood run hummingly warm in her veins afterward. They relaxed back into their meal and went on talking quietly among themselves while she sat in warm silence with her own bowl of chicken and dumplings steaming and smelling and slowly filling her stomach with a luxurious sense of delight. It was moments like these, she reflected, which made the war seem less ominous, though without it she knew they would not be where they were nor have fallen in together, and Huw ruined the fragile, happy feeling by singing softly to himself—