The Barrow (54 page)

She opened it, and peered through. It appeared to be a short servant's hall, with a small cloakroom or garderobe on one side, and a barred door at the other. She slipped to that door, lifted the bar, and stepped outside onto a small covered porch.

Annwyn stood for a while listening to the patter of the rain, and feeling the light wind on her face. She couldn't remember the last time she had stood outdoors alone, except perhaps a few stolen moments in the courtyards of her father's houses and holds.

From the rear porch she could see the shape and shadows of stacks of barrels and crates, hay bales, and wagons. Large braziers and lanterns hanging suspended from chains lit several nearby buildings in the compound, including what she took to be the bathhouse and another hall of some sort, both of which seemed to be alight with some signs of activity. She saw the doors to the bathhouse open and Gilgwyr stepped out, calling out something to someone still inside. She froze in the darkness of the rear porch, momentarily afraid that Gilgwyr might head toward her. But instead he slipped a tricorn hat onto his head and started out into the rain in the general direction of the great hall. She slowly stepped down off the porch so that she could follow his progress as he nonchalantly crossed the yards toward his destination. A large side door in the main building swung open, a block of orange-red light in the night with his silhouette within it, accompanied by a sudden rush of noise and music, and then the door was shut and the sound became muted again.

She stared at the great hall for a long time, uncertain of her next course. She knew
what
she wanted to do, she wanted to follow Gilgwyr inside; though
why
was perhaps a bit less clear, and she was also sure that some risk accompanied this desire. She wasn't sure how long she stood there, but eventually she began whispering to herself quietly. She gathered up her courage and hurried across the yards toward the great hall before she could change her mind.

In the back of a nearby wagon, Leigh sat unmoving, as still as a statue, his elbow propped on a crate and his top two fingers resting on his forehead above his eye. From beneath his hood and through narrowed eyelids he watched her cross the yard and then enter the great hall.

He smiled, and in his mind's eye he imagined her seated upon a fire-blackened throne of brass set over a jumbled field of polished bone, with a spiked crown made of brass upon her brow, and he thought to himself that she made quite a vision.

Upon entering the great hall of Woat's Roadside Inn, Annwyn came to a full and stunned stop as though the sights and sounds of the room were a physical wall that she had just run into. The main hall was a great timbered vault, and from the rafters hung soot-stained banners from every corner of the Middle Kingdoms, gifts left behind by previous travelers to mark their stay. The plastered stone walls at each end of the hall held a great fireplace, each so large several men could walk into it standing upright, and the walls themselves were festooned with antlers and horns from a dozen different kinds of beast, a veritable history of slaughter. Arcaded aisles ran along the sides of the main hall, disappearing into distant chambers at each end, and galleries ran above them. Two sets of long tables ran end-to-end the length of the hall, and around them sat or milled a sprawling, drunken crowd of travelers, traders, tinkers, robbers, thieves, brigands, landless knights, sell-swords, and slumming country lordlings. They clustered in the galleries and aisles of the hall, fell out of their chairs, mock-wrestled each other, fought for real until someone broke them up. They were watched over and served by scantily clad women and burly, leather-clad thugs, all of them at first glance seemingly related. A bawdy song was being roared at the top of a hundred lungs, and a loud, discordant drumming and piping was coming from somewhere, perhaps the gallery right above her. Naked dark-haired, pale-skinned women shimmied and shook on the tabletops, strutting and preening the length of the room for the crowds that caroused beneath them. Annwyn could smell roasting meat, unwashed bodies and vomit, and the sharp tang of freshly spilled beer.

She reeled, momentarily and completely disoriented.

There was almost nothing in her experience to remotely prepare her for a place such as this, not even the easy, joyous revelry of the Athairi camp. The Athairi were, despite their hedonism and loose morals, a refined, graceful, and courteous people; but the rough men and women that filled the hall at Woat's Inn were the kind that every part of her social world was designed to keep as far away from her as possible. Most of her time was spent within her own family and household, and outside the walls of her father's houses and estates, her encounters were generally with other members of the ruling class of the Middle Kingdoms and its High Court. The tradesmen and crafters, farmers and laborers that supplied her household and made its functioning possible only ever met her under the auspices of her authority, as a full Lady of a landed Aurian family with a baron's title before their name; and most of them were well versed in the behavior expected of them in an encounter with their social betters. But here the social niceties of the courtly culture of the Middle Kingdoms was replaced by the more mercenary give-and-take of want and fulfillment, supply and demand, a
need
and a
price
.

And she'd never seen anything quite like it.

A woman bearing a tray of wooden mugs filled with ale almost knocked her over, and that shook Annwyn out of her shocked reverie. She drew her cloak and hood tightly about her, so that her face was completely in shadow, and pressed herself tightly to a wooden arcade column, trying to make herself as small as possible. Thankfully the crowds near her were so besotted with wine and ale and the proximity of naked women that she went entirely unnoticed, a dark shape blended into a dark shape. And so, left to her own devices, she slowly got her bearings, and her shock began to turn into something like curiosity.

She had found the dancing of the Athairi women she'd seen a few short days ago to be sensual, and erotic, with a core of grace and beauty even as it invited the viewer to unchaste thoughts and acts. The dancing here was cruder, more animal, more primal, almost ugly, as though the art had been stripped away to reveal the dance at its most salacious core. It was certainly less practiced; some of the women moved quite clumsily, as though inhibited by drink or weight or age. As she looked more closely, she thought the women here looked tired and worn-down, even the ones that at first glance had seemed like they might be beautiful, which admittedly was not many; most of the women here were clearly Woatlings, with the same curled, sneering lips and slightly cross-eyed look as the men-folk from the clan. Unlike the Athairi dancers, who had moved according to an inner fire and heat, swept up in a passion for music and rhythm and sex, most of the women in this hall seemed duller fare, with faces that were either too hard or too soft, and eyes that were either predatory or simply vacant, as though their very spirits were being drained away.

But the drunken and desperate men here didn't seem to care very much, as far as she could tell. They happily tossed coins onto the tabletops under the feet of the dancing women, or into the air to fall haphazardly wherever they might land. Occasionally a dancer would reward a man that threw enough coins by taking him by the hand and leading him off somewhere behind the antlered walls, as his companions cheered his presumably good fortune.

As she surveyed the room and calmed her mind and racing heart, she came to realize that Gilgwyr was nowhere to be seen, unless he was in some dark corner hidden away somewhere. Slowly and carefully she wended her way through the crowds of men in the side aisles of the hall and, upon finding an ornamented staircase at the rear of one of those aisles, went up to the upper galleries looking out over the raucous hall. She passed men drunk and sober, gamblers playing at dice and ignoring the nudity hovering nearby, traders arguing over the fair price of a dozen Highlands half-bred chargers, partisans arguing over whether Prince Hektor should step aside as next in line to the Erid crown in favor of his younger and more dashing brother Prince Colin, and thieves plotting to rob a wealthy jeweler traveling next week from Newgate to Westmark, but she did not see Gilgwyr amongst any of them.

Annwyn frowned, looking down upon the main hall from the relative safety of one of the upper galleries, taking her time to scan the men milling amongst the two rows of long tables below. She looked long enough to be convinced that Gilgwyr was not there. Confusion was about to set in on her when she spied a naked dancer stumbling out of the back areas behind the stone wall at the far end of the hall, where the dancers were taking their trysts, and she realized it was the one place she hadn't looked.

She worked her way back downstairs and down one of the long aisles, then slipped into the back of the great hall. The chamber beyond was darker than the main hall and built into a warren of stalls. She could hear moans from men and women, gasps and shouts, from somewhere a kind of rhythmic slapping, and her heart started racing and her throat suddenly went dry. The stalls had no doors, and as she wandered light-headed down the tight passageway that wound its way through them, she glimpsed men and women in varying degrees of undress and in different poses. A heady mix of fear and a strange, inchoate desire welled up within her; she tried not to look, tried not to stare, tried to only see the faces of the men, to find the familiar face of her quarry amongst them, but it didn't always work. She gasped and stared into a stall as a Woatling pulled her mouth off an erect penis, a strand of saliva still connecting her tongue to the bulging tip, the act barely registering in her mind before she was hurrying on. She blushed and faltered at the sight of a man's pale, fat, hairy buttocks quivering and shaking as he thrust and thrust into a woman lying beneath him, her dainty but dirty feet waving in the air above his back. Annwyn felt flush, her body overheated, as though she might faint at any moment.

She stumbled through past the last of the stalls, and staggered against a dilapidated wooden wall, trying to catch her breath and calm her racing heart. She stood there, breathing heavily, until she realized that through the wall she could hear men cheering and shouting. There were a number of gaps and holes in the panels of the wall. She stared at a hole about eye-level for a moment, biting her lip. Then slowly, very deliberately, she stepped forward and she pressed her eye to the hole, and peered through it into a dark and dingy room.

A lurid scene was laid out before her. A grim-looking lot of six surly men in soiled leathers stood toward the center of the room, lit by lanterns. They weren't Woats, but might as well have been. Most of them had dark, dirty, straggly hair and unkempt beards or mustaches, though one of them had a shaved head and another had golden-red hair and a great bushy beard and very pale skin. Some of them had mugs of ale in their hands; others held and stroked cocks of varying degrees of hardness. They were loudly and profanely cheering on as a man and a woman had sex in front of them.

The woman was on all fours on an impromptu platform made of a hay bale covered by a dark red velvet cloak, her athletic, curvaceous body shaking and her arms and hands outstretched before her to tightly grip the cloak and bale for dear life as she was vigorously pounded from behind by a muscular beast of a man. She wore riding boots and had a jeweled half-mask over her eyes and nose, leaving her panting and gasping mouth exposed, and the mask bound up her dark hair in an elaborate jeweled black lace headband. The man behind her was broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, with muscular arms and legs and hips, with wiry thick hair on his chest thinning down toward his loins, matted with sweat. He had a cruel, bestial look about his face, with a strong nose and thick brows and a stubble-covered chin that looked carved from stone, and his hair was growing long, hanging in front of his eyes and down past his ears. He held her hips in his big hands and pulled her ass back into his every forward thrust, hammering into her upraised pelvis, the round globes of her ass shaking from his efforts. They both glistened with sweat in the golden lamp light, droplets dripping and flying from their hair and bodies with every thrust and parry.

Annwyn gaped in shock and amazement. Part of her wanted to scream and tear herself away from her peephole, but she couldn't move a muscle. It took several moments for it to register upon her addled brain that there were several other figures in the room. One was a knight that she almost mistook for a statue; he stood motionless, fully clad from head-to-toe in russeted plate harness, a dark red cloak hanging over one of his spiked pauldrons, the visor of his broad sallet helm down, his gauntleted right hand on the hilt of an unsheathed greatsword. Next to him stood what was clearly one of the Woats, but an older and (if such a thing were possible) more distinguished specimen of the clan, wearing black leathers and slashed velvet, bearded and mustachioed with salt-and-pepper hair in a ponytail. And next to him stood Gilgwyr, eyeing the fornicating couple and casually saying something to the Woat that made the man laugh.