Sun Wolf 1 - The Ladies Of Mandrigyn (22 page)

It wasn’t until now that he realized how much he simply valued her. On campaign, days or weeks might go by without his seeing her, but he had known she was always there. Now, sometimes he would waken in the night and realize that if something went wrong—which he had no doubt that it would—he would never see her again. He had half expected to die in Mandrigyn, but he had never before thought of death in those terms.

It was a dangerous thought, and he pushed it from his mind as he entered the vast brown shadows of the orangery. It was, he thought, what his father had meant when he spoke of going soft—a blurring on the hard edge of a warrior’s heart. And why, damn it all? Starhawk wasn’t even pretty.

Not what most fools would call pretty, anyway.

Rain beat on the portion of the orangery roof that was not covered by the loft. The great room echoed softly with its dull roaring. In the now-familiar darkness, the few trees that had not been moved out into the succession houses were grouped like sleeping trolls in a corner, concealing the practice hacking-posts. The table still stood at the end of the room near the door that led to his narrow stairs. On an overturned tub, her head in her hands, staring blindly at the gray boards of the wall, sat Sheera, the heavy wool of her crimson gown falling like a river of blood about her feet.

Her son had been right. She had clearly been crying.

Her eyes, when she raised them as he passed, were red-rimmed and swollen, but he saw her force hardness into them and calm into her face. She said, “How soon can the women be ready to attack the mines?”

“With or without a wizard to help?” he countered.

The tiredness in her face turned to anger, like a flash of lighted blasting powder, and she opened her mouth to snap something at him.

“A real wizard, not the local poison monger.”

The red lips closed, and the hard lines that he had lately seen so often carved themselves from the flared nostrils to the taut corners of her mouth. “How long?”

“A month—six weeks.”

“That’s too long.”

He shrugged. “You’re the commander—Commander.”

He turned to go, and she surged to her feet and seized his arm, thrusting him around to face her again. “What’s wrong with going in now?”

“Nothing,” he said. “As long as you don’t care that all of your friends who’ve been loyal enough to you—and to their patriotic and pox-rotted cause—to half kill themselves and put their families in danger by learning how to soldier are going to die because you lead them into battle half prepared.”

Her hand dropped from his arm as if his flesh had turned to a serpent’s scales. But he saw in her anger a lurking fear as well, the desperation of a woman fighting fate and circumstance with dwindling reserves of strength.

“Don’t you understand?” she asked, her voice trembling with weariness and rage, “Every day we wait, he gets stronger; and every day we wait, the chances double that Tarrin will be hurt or put to death in the mines. They already suspect him of organizing trouble there; he has been whipped and racked for it, then thrown back onto the chain to do his full share of the work with his limbs half dislocated. One day word of it will get back to Altiokis. But without him, the men’s resistance would crumble—he is all their hope, and the brightness of his courage all that stands between their minds and the numbing despair of slavery.

“I know,” she whispered. “He is a born leader, a born king; and he has a king’s magic, to draw the hearts of his followers unquestioningly. I loved him from the moment we met; from the instant we laid eyes on each other, we knew we would be lovers.”

“And does that keep you from playing along with the courtship of Derroug Dru?” the Wolf demanded snidely.

“Courtship?”
She spat the word at him scornfully. “Pah! Is that what you think he wants? Marriage or even an honorable love? You don’t know the man. Because I was the wife of his chief supporter, the most important and richest man of his faction in the town, he held off. But he would always follow me with his eyes. Now he comes around like a dog when the bitch is in season . . . ”

Sun Wolf leaned his broad shoulders against one of the rude cedar pillars that held up the roof, “Then I guess poisoning your husband was a little hasty on your part, wasn’t it?”

Her eyes flashed at him like a beast’s in the gloom of the vast hall. “Hasty?” she snarled at him. “Hasty, when that pig had pretended to go over to Tarrin’s faction, during the feuding before Altiokis’ attack; when he encouraged every man loyal to Tarrin, every man loyal to his city, to join Tarrin’s army, already knowing what would happen to them at Iron
Pass? There was nothing he did not deserve for what he did that day.”

She was striding back and forth, the faint sheen from the windows rippling like light on an animal’s pelt, her face white against the bloody color of her gown and the blackness of her hair. “What he did that day has cut across my life, cut across the life of every person in this city. It has left us uprooted, robbed us of the ones we love, and put us in continual peril of our lives. What did he deserve, if not that?”

“I don’t know,” Sun Wolf said quietly. “Considering that’s exactly what you did to me, without so much as a second thought, I can’t give a very fair answer to that question.” He left her and mounted the dark, enclosed stairway to his loft, the rain beating like thunder around him and over his head.

It was raining in Pergemis. The hard, leaden downpour beat a fierce tattoo on the peaked slate roofs of that crowded city with a sound almost like the drumming of hail. The cobblestones of the sloping street, three stories below the window where Starhawk sat, were running like a river; white streams frothed from the gutters of the roofs. Beyond the close-angled stone walls, the distant sea was the same cold, deep gray as the sky.

Starhawk, leaning her forehead against the glass, felt it like damp ice against her skin. Somewhere in the tall, narrow house she could hear Fawn’s voice, light and bantering, the tone she used to speak to the children. Then her footfalls came dancing down the stairs.

She is on her feet again,
the Hawk thought. It is time to travel on.

The thought pulled at her, like a load resumed before the back was fully rested. She wondered how many days they had lost. Twenty?
Thirty? What might have befallen the Wolf in those days?

Nothing that she could have remedied, she thought. And she could not have left Fawn.

By the time they had reached the crossroads, where the southward way to the Bight
Coast parted from the highland road that led to Racken Scrag and eventually to Grimscarp, the mauled flesh of Fawn’s arm and throat had begun to fester. Starhawk had done what she could for it. Anyog, whose hurts by chance or magic remained clean, was far too ill to help her. There had been no question of a parting of the ways.

By the time they had reached Pergemis, Fawn had been raving, moaning in an agony of pain and calling weakly for Sun Wolf. In the blurred nightmare of days and nights that had followed, in spite of all that the lady Pel Farstep could do, the girl had wandered in desperate delirium, sobbing for him to save her.

During those first four or five days in the house of the widowed mother of Ram and Orris, Starhawk had known very little beyond unremitting tiredness and fear and remembered clearly meeting no one but Pel herself. The mother of the ox team was ridiculously like her brother Anyog—small, wiry, with hair as crisp and white-streaked as his beard. She had taken immediate charge of Fawn and Starhawk both, nursing the sick girl tirelessly in the intervals of running one of the most thriving mercantile establishments in the town. Starhawk’s memories of that time were a blur of stinking poultices that burned her hands, herbed steam and the coolness of lavender water, exhaustion such as she had never known in war, and a bitter, guilty wretchedness that returned like the hurt of an old wound every time she saw Fawn’s white, drawn face. The other members of the household had been only voices and occasional faces peering in at the door.

Her only clear recollection of the events of that time had been of the night they had cut half a handful of suppurating flesh from Fawn’s wound. She had sat up with Fawn afterward, the girl’s faint, sleeping breath the only sound in the dark house. She had meditated, found no peace in it, and was sitting in the cushioned chair beside the bed, staring into the darkness beyond the single candle, when Anyog had come in, panting with the exertion of having dragged himself there from his own room on the other side of the house. He had shaken off her anxious efforts to make him sit; up until recently he had been worse off than Fawn and still looked like a corpse in its winding sheet, wrapped in his draggled bed robe.

He had only clung to her for support, gasping, “Swear to me you will tell no one. Swear it on your life.” And when she had sworn, he had sat on the edge of the bed and clumsily, with the air of one long out of practice, worked spells of healing with hands that shook from weakness.

Pel Farstep had remarked to Starhawk after this that her brother’s sleep seemed troubled. In his nightmares, he could be heard to whisper the name of the Wizard King.

In addition to Pel, the family consisted of her three sons—Imber was the oldest, splitting the headship of the Farstep merchant interests with her—Imber’s wife Gillie, and their horrifyingly enterprising offspring, Idjit and Keltic. Idjit was three, alarmingly suave and nimble-tongued for a boy of his years and masterfully adept at getting his younger sister to do his mischief for him. In the spring, Gillie expected a third child. “We’re praying for another lassie,” Imber confided to Starhawk one evening as she played at finger swords with Idjit before the kitchen hearth, “given the peck of trouble this lad’s been.”

The household further boasted a maid, a manservant, and three clerks who slept in the attics under the streaming slates of the roof, plus two cats and three of the little black ships’ dogs seen in such numbers about the city. Pel ruled the whole concern with brisk love and a rod of iron.

It was a house, Starhawk thought, in which she could have been happy, had things been otherwise.

There would be no glory here, she mused, gazing out into the dove-colored afternoon rain; none of the cold, bright truth of battle, where all things had the shine of triumph, edged in the inky shadow of death. There was none of the strenuous beauty of the warrior’s way here and no one here who would understand it. But life in more muted colors could be comfortable, too. And she would not be lonely.

Loneliness was nothing new to Starhawk. There were times when she felt that she had always been lonely, except when she was with Sun Wolf.

These days of rest had given her time to be alone and time to meditate, and the deep calm of it had cleared her thoughts. Having admitted her love to herself, she did not know whether she could return to being what she had been; but without the Wolf’s presence, she knew that it would not much matter to her where she was or what she did. There was the possibility—the probability after so much time—that he was dead and that her long quest would find only darkness and grief at its end.

Yet she could not conceive of abandoning that quest.

It was nearing lamp lighting time. The room was on the south side of the house, facing the sea, and brightness lingered on there when, in the rest of the house, Gillie and the maid Pearl began to set out the fat, white, beeswax candles and the lamps of multicolored glass. The hangings of the bed—the best guest bed that she had shared with Fawn for the last week, since Fawn’s recovery—were a rich shade of red in daylight, but in this half-light they looked almost black, and the colors of the frieze of stenciled flowers on the pale plaster of walls had grown vague and indistinguishable in the shadows. Opposite her, above the heavy carved dresser, a big mural showed some local saint walking on the waters of the sea to preach to the mermaids, with fish and octopi meticulously depicted playing about his toes.

Sitting in the window seat, Starhawk pulled the thick folds of her green wool robe closer about her. Her hair was damp from washing and still smelled of herbed soap. She and Ram had taken Idjit and baby Keltic down walking on the stone quays after lunch, as the gulls wheeled overhead piping warnings of the coming storm. The expedition had been a success. Idjit had induced Keltic to fetch him crabs from one of the tide pools at the far end of the horn of land that lay beyond the edge of the docks, and Starhawk had had to slop to the rescue, with Ram hovering anxiously about, warning her not to be hurt. A most satisfying day for all concerned, she thought and grinned.

For a woman who had spent her entire life in the company of adults—either nuns or warriors—she was appalled at how idiotically fond she was of children.

It would not be easy, she knew, to leave this pleasant house, particularly in light of what she and Fawn must face.

Yet the days here had been fraught with guilty restlessness; nights she had lain awake, listening to the girl’s soft breath beside her, wondering if the days she spent taking care of Fawn were bought out of Sun Wolf’s life.

But she could not abandon her among strangers. And this knowledge had made Starhawk philosophical. There had been entire days in which she had been truly able to rest and peaceful evenings in the great kitchen or in the family room, listening to Gillie play her bone flute and talking of travel and far places with Ram. When Fawn was able to come haltingly down the stairs, she joined them. Starhawk was amused to see that she had won Orris’ busy heart with her quick understanding of money and trade.

For Starhawk, at such times, it was as if she had refound her older brothers. After Pel and Fawn and Gillie had taken themselves off to bed, she had spent evening after evening drinking and dicing with the three big oxen, telling stories, or listening to them speak of the northeastward roads.

“You aren’t the only ones who’ve spoken of the nuuwa running in bands these days,” Imber said, tucking his long-stemmed pipe into the corner of his mouth and gazing across the table at Starhawk with eyes that were as blue, but much quicker and shrewder, than those of either of his brothers. “After these gomerils left for the North, we had word of it, before the weather closed the sea lanes. I had fears they’d come to grief in the mountains.”