Sun Wolf 1 - The Ladies Of Mandrigyn (13 page)

“And then Dru figured out a way that we could get money from the treasury, and they started raising funds to hire mercenaries. And . . . ” She spread her hands, her fine fingers almost translucent in the ivory moonlight. “Our organization became a part of theirs—and Tarrin’s. Tarrin and the men are still getting us information on the mines, sending it through the skags . . . ”

“The what?”
The word was familiar to him from mercenary slang; he knew it to mean the cheapest sort of women who’d sell themselves to hide tanners and garbagemen for the price of a cup of inferior wine.

“The skags.”
She widened those soft, mead-colored orbs at him. “You know—the ugly women or the fat ones or the old, flabby ones. The guards think it’s hilarious to throw them to a gang of miners. Some of the slaves down there have been in the mines so long they’re almost beasts themselves.” The delicate lips tightened into momentary hardness, and an anger that he had never seen before flashed in those kitten eyes. “They’ll drag one of these women down and toss her into a slave barracks, say, ‘Have at her, boys,’ and then leave.”

She was silent for a moment, looking out into the distance, drawing the edge of the sheet over and over through her fingers. Outwardly her face was calm, but her rage against the men who had the power to do this—and perhaps against all men—was like a heat that he could feel through her silken skin where it touched his shoulder. And who was he to argue? he wondered bitterly. The memory of things that he himself, or men he had known, had considered funny while half drunk and sacking a city silenced him before her anger.

Then she shrugged and put the anger aside. “But it’s the skags who communicate from gang to gang of the men. Mostly Tarrin’s orders keep them from being abused. The superintendents keep mixing the newcomers, the men of Mandrigyn, in with older miners—there are thousands of them down there—to prevent the men from plotting among themselves. But they only spread the plot. And the rest of us—the ones most of these men wouldn’t let their wives talk to before the war—have gotten maps of the mines and wax impressions of the keys to the gates—you know Gilden’s sister Eo is a smith? She copies the keys—and details of where the armories are.”

He settled his back against the wall and regarded her almost wonderingly in the shadows. Outside, the moonlight was dimming, and the smell of rain blew in through the window like a cold perfume. Limned by the faint light, the girl’s face looked young, almost childlike; he remembered her by candlelight in the rose-scented room in Kedwyr, laughing that soft, throaty, professional laugh as she drew him into the conspiracy’s trap. He realized that it was a compliment to him that she showed him her other face—frank, open, without artifice, the face she showed her women friends. Undoubtedly, it was the face she showed her lover. He found himself wondering if she had a lover, as opposed to a “regular”; or if he, like Gilden’s nameless husband, like Beddick M’Tree, like so many others, had followed Tarrin of the House of Her on that last campaign up to the Iron
Pass.

The warm weight of her settled against his shoulder, a gesture of intimacy that was less sexual than friendly, like a cat deciding to settle on his knee. “We’ve been talking too much,” she said, and her professional voice was back, soft and teasing.

“One more question,” he said. “Why are you here?”

She smiled.

He intercepted her reaching hand. “You’re afraid of me, aren’t you?”

He felt her body shift in the circle of his arm; when she answered, her voice was that of a girl of nineteen, scarred by what she was, but frank and without artifice. “I was,” she said. Moonlight tipped her lashes in silver as she looked up at him. “But I didn’t think it was fair for you not to know how things stood with the organization. Dru and Sheera said that the less you knew, the less you could tell anyone. But as for your question . . . ” Her lips brushed his in the darkness. “I have my secrets, too.”

He drew her to him. As he moved, the links of the chain around his neck jangled faintly in the silence of the dark loft.

The problems of weapons and of a secondary place to practice by daylight, away from Derroug Dru’s spies, were solved, not by Sheera’s ingenuity, but by fate, guided presumably by Sun Wolf’s deceased and uproariously amused ancestors.

The Thanelands that lay to the east of Mandrigyn had long been under the governorship of Altiokis; indeed, the haughty and old-fashioned Thanes of the clans that held them had been the first to swear allegiance to the Wizard King. But Altiokis’ realm had spread to the richer cities of the coastlands and had drawn upon the slave-worked veins of gold and silver in the mountains for its wealth. The Thanelands were left, as they had always been, as a useless and sparsely populated backwater. The roads winding into those gray hills from the jumble of taverns and dives of East
Shore led nowhere. After the sheep had grazed on the scraggly grass and heather had been folded in for the winter, the Thanelands lay utterly empty.

So it was an easy matter for the women to slip across the Rack
River in the predawn darkness of a rainy morning and be away from all sight of the city by sunup, to run in the wilderness of whin and peat bogs unobserved.

Freezing wind blew another squall of rain over Sun Wolf’s bare back. In the low ground between the drenched, gray hills, the water lay like hammered silver, just above the freezing point; on the high ground, the rocks made the easiest going, for the wet, bare, winter-tough brambles could scratch even the most liberally mud-armored flesh.

Ahead of him, the main pack of the running women bobbed through the colorless light of the wan afternoon. They were clearly flagging.

Those who hadn’t braided their hair up wore it in slick, sodden cloaks down over their backs. Just ahead of him, a slender woman raised her arms to gather up a soaked blond coil that reached almost down to her shapely backside, her pace slackening as she did so. Sun Wolf, overtaking her in the slashing rain, bellowed, “You going to mess with your poxy hair in battle, sweetheart?”

She turned a startled, flowerlike face upon him, now haggard with fatigue; others, as guilty as she, looked also. He raised his voice into a cutting roar, meant to be heard over the din of battle. “Next person who touches her hair, I’m going to cut it off!”

They all buckled to and ran harder, arms swinging, knees pumping, leather-bound breasts bouncing, drawers sticking wetly to their bodies in the rain. They had all come to the conclusion, in the course of the last week, that there was not a great deal that Sun Wolf would not do.

And that, he thought grimly as he increased his own pace and forged easily ahead through the pack, was as it should be.

Very few of the women ran well. Tisa did—Gilden Shorad’s leggy fifteen-year-old daughter. So did whatever her name was—a rangy, homely mare of a fisherman’s wife—Emtwyff Fish. So did Denga Rey. The rest of them had been soft-raised, and even the hardiest had neither the wind nor the endurance for sustained fighting.

A few of them, Sun Wolf was amused to note, still suffered agonies of self-consciousness about being near naked in the presence of a man.

He passed Sheera, laboring exhaustedly in the rear third of the field. Her black hair was plastered to her cheeks where it had come out of its braids; she was muddy, wet, gasping, and still enough to stir a man’s blood in his veins. He hoped viciously that she was enjoying training as a warrior.

On the whole.
Sun Wolf was surprised at how many had lasted that first week.

A week’s hard training had cut their numbers down to fifty, and it spoke well for their determination that any had remained at all. All of them—maidens, matrons, and those who were neither—had been subjected to the most taxingly rigorous physical training that Sun Wolf could devise; tumbling to train the reflexes and identify the cowards; weights and throwing to strengthen the arms; hand-to-hand fighting, wrestling, or dueling with blunted weapons; running on the hills. These were preliminaries to the more vicious arts of infighting and sneaky death to come.

Women who the Wolf would have sworn would make champions with the best had dropped out; half-pints like Wilarne M’Tree and maladroits like Drypettis Dru were still with them. He could see those two from where he ran, laboring along a dozen yards behind the rest of the pack.

Sun Wolf was rapidly coming to the conclusion that he did not and never would understand women.

Starhawk .
 . . 

He had always thought of Starhawk as different from other women, even from the other warrior women of his own troop. It was only now, when he was surrounded by women, that elements of her personality fell into place for him, and he saw her as both less and more enigmatic, a woman who had rejected the subjugation these women had been trained in—had rejected it long before her path had crossed his own.

Briefly the memory of their first meeting flitted through his mind; how cold the spring sunlight had been in the garden of the Convent of St. Cherybi, and how strong the smell of the new-turned earth. He saw her again as the tall girl she had been, ascetic, distant, and cold as marble in the dark robes of a nun. He’d forgotten why he’d even been at the Convent—probably extorting provisions from the Mother there—but he remembered that moment when their eyes met and he knew that this woman was a warrior in her heart.

He had never believed that he would miss her as much as he did. Amber Eyes was sweet-natured and supremely beddable, exactly the kind of girl he liked—or had liked, anyway—but it was Starhawk for whom he reached, as a man in danger would reach for his sword. He had never quite gotten over not having her there at his side.

His front runners were cresting the final hill above the copse of woods where they had gathered that morning. They’d covered about two and a half miles—not bad for a first run, for women untrained to it, he thought as he slacked his pace and let himself fall back through the pack once more. He yelled a curse at Gilden, who was flagging, her face the bright fuchsia hue that extremely fair women turned in exhaustion; she staggered into a futile but gratifying attempt at a burst of speed.

He cursed them as he would have cursed his men, calling them cowards, babies, sluts. As he fell back farther in the group, to run beside the grimly stumbling Sister Quincis, he yelled, “I’ve seen Trinitarian heretics run faster than that!”

They broke over the crest of the hill in a spilling wave. Below them, the land lay barren and grayish brown under the sluicing rain, the long snake of silver water in the bottom of the vale reflecting the colorless sky. The brush around it was black, dead with winter. Sun Wolf slowed his pace still further to round in the last of the stragglers. Denga Key, her hard brown muscles shining with moisture, had already reached the mere below.

He yelled after them, “Run, you lazy bitches!” and collected a look from Drypettis that could have been bottled and sold to remove the veneer from furniture. He was almost standing still as Wilarne M’Tree staggered past. He hurried her on her way with a swat on her little round rump.

By the time he reached the growing group around the water, two or three of them had recovered enough breath to begin throwing up.

“You do that in the woods under the leaves where it’s not going to be seen by an enemy scout!” he roared at the green-faced and retching Eo. “You want Altiokis’ spies to follow the stink of you to your hideout? I mean it!” he added as she started to double over again and, seizing her by the back of the neck, he shoved her toward the trees. Others had begun to stumble in that direction already.

To Sheera, for whom it was too late, he ordered, “Clean that up.”

Without a word, for she was far past speech, she gathered up leaves to obey him.

“And the rest of you start walking,” he ordered curtly. “You’ll get chilled if you stand around, and I’m not going to have the lot of you sniveling and fainting on me at practice tonight.”

“Very nice!”
A voice, deep and harsh as a crow’s, laughed from the sheltering darkness of the nearby woods. “I had been told that any excuse for a red-blooded male in Mandrigyn had been sent to the mines. I am pleased to see that the reports were exaggerated.”

Sun Wolf swung around. White-faced, Sheera got to her feet. A tall bay horse stepped from the tangled brambles of the thickets. The woman on its back sat sidesaddle, her body straight as a spear. In the shadows of a green oilskin hood, hazel-gray eyes flashed mockingly. The cloak covered most of her, except for the hem of her gown and her gloves, and these were of such barbaric richness as to leave little doubt about her station. The bay’s bridle had cheekpieces of brass, worked into the shape of flowers.

“Marigolds,” Sheera said quietly. “The emblem of the Thanes of Wrinshardin.”

The old woman turned her head with a slow, ironic smile. “Yes,” she purred. “Yes, I am Lady Wrinshardin. The Thane’s mother, not his wife. And you are, unless I am much mistaken, the legendary Sheera Galena, in whose honor my son once wrote such puerile verse.”

Sheera’s chin came up. The thick curls of her black hair plastered wetly to her cheeks, and the rain gleamed on her bare arms and shoulders, which had already turned bright red with cold and gooseflesh. “If your son is the present Thane of Wrinshardin who courted me when I was fifteen,” she replied coolly, “I am pleased to see that your taste in poetry so closely parallels my own.”

There was a momentary silence. Then that mocking smile widened, and Lady Wrinshardin said, “Well. At the time, I presumed that, like most town-bred hussies, you had turned down the chance of wedding decent blood out of considerations of money and the boredom of country life. I am pleased to see that you acted rather from good sense.” The sharp, faded old eyes casually raked the scene before her, taking in the exhausted, bedraggled woman and the big man with the chain about his neck who had not the eyes of a slave.

“I don’t suppose I have ever seen a man chase this many women since my husband died,” she remarked in her harsh, drawling voice. “And even he never did so fifty at a time. Is running about the hills naked in the wintertime a new fad in the town, or could it be that there is a purpose behind this?”