The Ladies of Mandrigyn

12

Sun Wolf paused in his pacing, hearing the sound of soft, approaching footfalls in the darkness. From the stairs, he thought. His sigh was deep and bored, and he shifted his weight as a man would do on a long stint of guard. The pattering steps halted. Around him, the vast, chilly darkness was lambent with breath.

Somewhere a board creaked. Then weight struck his shoulders and the back of his knee—light, muscled weight, like a cat’s, vicious and controlled. At the first breath of impact, he twisted, slithering free of the smooth arms that sought his neck. In the darkness, he reached back and expertly tweaked the short little nose that snorted with exertion so close to his ear.

He felt his assailant step away. With an oily hiss of hot metal, someone uncovered a dark-lantern. Behind him, Gilden stood panting, regarding him with injured chagrin.

All around the room, their hair tight-braided and their smooth arms traced in the shadows with the faint, clear lines of muscle definition, the ladies of Mandrigyn watched him, a sea of aggrieved eyes.

“You’re pulling with your shoulders,” he told Gilden, looking down into those long-lashed, sea-blue eyes. “Your center of balance is lower than a man’s—that’s why you women have hell’s own time throwing each other. It’s one of your advantages against a man. Throw from the hips—like this—lever me down. Somebody your size, trying to use brute force against someone my size, is more than stupid—she’s suicidal.”

Gilden colored, but said, “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“And I heard you coming.”

She said something else then, sotto voce and obviously picked up from Crazy red’s vocabulary.

He glanced at the assembled ladies. “Next?”

Behind him, he heard Gilden’s swift hiss of intaken breath, a voiceless protest. When he turned and raised one shaggy brow at her, she asked, “Couldn’t I try again?”

“No,” he said gently, “because you had only one chance, and now you’re dead. Go sit down.”

She returned without a word to her place on the edge of one of the upturned tree tubs between Wilarne and her daughter, Tisa. Sun Wolf, for the tenth time so far that evening, walked over to the little potting room that opened off the main orangery, so that he would neither see nor hear—supposedly—where his next assailant would begin her attack. The single dark-lantern that illuminated the vast room threw his shadow, huge and grotesque and swaying, across the gray boards of the wall; he heard Denga Rey fuss with the lantern slide and curse when she scorched her fingers. As he closed the door behind him, he heard the soft rise of talk. Gilden, glib as always, had informed him that this was to cover any noise that the next attacker might make in taking her place, but Sun Wolf suspected that it was simply because the women liked to talk.

It was something he’d found was true even of Starhawk, though there wasn’t a man in the troop who’d believe that. So far as he knew, he was the only one she talked to freely, not with the inconsequential small talk of war and the camp, but of things that really concerned her, the past and the future, gardening, theology, the nature of fear. In an odd way, he had felt curiously honored when he had realized that this was true, for Starhawk’s facade was one of the coldest and most distant that he had ever seen. Most of the men were a little afraid of her.

He himself had been appalled by the realization that he loved her.

For one thing, one of the most fatal mistakes any commander could make was to fall in love with one of his captains, whether man or woman. It always became known, and he had never seen a time when trouble had not come of it.

For another thing, Starhawk was heart and bones a warrior; logical, emotionless, and ruthless with anything that came in the way of her chosen course. The affairs she had had with other members of the troop had been terminated the minute the men had interfered with her training. Sun Wolf was not entirely certain what her reaction would be if he should return to Wrynde and tell her, “I love you, Starhawk.”

And yet, he found himself very much looking forward to returning to Wrynde and finding her there, grave, homely, sarcastically demanding if he’d been kidnapped by all those women for stud.

There was a respectful tap at the door. He came out and signaled Denga Rey to kill the lamp again. Then he began to walk, with a slow pace like a sentry’s, the length of that empty darkness, listening for his next student in this lesson in how to take out and kill a man.

It was Eo, not quite as heavy and not nearly as clumsy as she had been. She acquitted herself well, timing her footsteps against his and remembering to throw from the hip, not the shoulders. He hit the floor hard and tapped her arm as the bone of her wrist clamped his windpipe shut. She released him instantly, and the light went up to show her bending anxiously over him, afraid she had done him real harm. He sat up, rubbing his throat and grinning; it was very much like the blacksmith to knock a man senseless and beg his pardon contritely when he came to.

That was something he had found quite common to the women, this concern for one another’s bruises. Curse and revile himself blue in the face as he might, he could seldom get even the smallest aggression toward one another out of them. Their technique was good. Most of them understood the leverage their small size needed and, between running and strenuous, night-and-morning training, they were developing the reflexes necessary to put them even with larger and heavier opponents. But he was forever seeing someone at sword practice get in a really telling wallop on her opponent, then immediately lower her weapon and make sure the other woman wasn’t hurt before going on. It drove Sun Wolf nearly crazy; if he hadn’t seen them fight against the nuuwa, he would have tried—unsuccessfully, he presumed—to wash his hands of the whole affair.

He had found out many things about women in the last few weeks.

He had learned that women, among themselves, could carry on conversations whose bawdiness would have set any mercenary of the Wolf’s acquaintance squirming. He’d learned this the evening he’d gone to soak himself in the hot tub, partitioned from the main bathhouse, after training, when the women were in the main part of the baths and had assumed he’d gone up to bed. It had been a startling and eye-opening experience for a man raised on the popular masculine myth of feminine delicacy. “I wouldn’t even tell jokes like that,” he’d said later to Amber Eyes, and she had dissolved into disconcerting giggles.

Another alarming thing about the women was their prankishness. The ringleaders in everything from ambushing him as he emerged, pink and dripping, after his bath to sending him anonymous and horrific love letters were Gilden Shorad and Wilarne M’Tree, outwardly as gracious and poised a pair of matrons as ever a man made his bow to in the street.

But the main thing that he had found was their strength—dogged, ruthless, and, if necessary, crueler than any man’s. It had an animal quality to it, forged by years of repression; for all their beauty and sweetness, these were fifty people who would do whatever it was necessary to do, and the single-mindedness of it sometimes frightened him.

He thought of it now, sitting at last alone in the potting room, warming his hands over a brazier of coals, listening to the women depart. The rain had resumed, pattering noisily on the roof overhead, murmuring in the waters of the canals. Most mornings, the lower islands of the city were flooded, the great squares before its floating miracles of churches and town hall transformed to wastes of water crossed with crude duckboards. The damp cold ate at his bones. The women were wrapped like treacle-cured hams in leather and oiled silk, their voices a soft music in the semi dark.

The next class would be starting soon. Through the slits of the shuttered window of the potting room, he watched their shadows flicker against the lights of the house and smiled a little at the thought of them. They’d come a long way—from veiled, timid creatures blushing at the presence of a man—even the ones who had children and had presumably conceived them somehow—to cool and deadly fighters. If what Gilden and others told him was true, they’d become hardheaded, matter-of-fact businessmen and shopkeepers as well.

The men of Mandrigyn, he thought wryly, were in for one hell of a surprise when they finally got home.

The potting room was dark, but for the poppy-red glow of the brazier; shadowy shapes of trowels, rakes, and sprouted bulbs lurked gold-edged in the shadows. The smells of the place were familiar to him—humus, compost, cedar mast, the wetter, rockier scent of gravel, and the faintly dusty smell of the half hod of sea coal in the comer. From the door, he caught Sheera’s voice, low and tense, speaking to someone outside, then Drypettis’ high, piercing tones. He heard Tarrin’s name spoken—that lost Prince and golden hope, slaving to organize the mines—and then Drypettis’ voice again.

“But he is worthy of you, Sheera,” she said. “Of all of them, he is the only man in the city worthy of your love—the greatest and the best. I have always thought it.”

“He is the only man in the city whom I have ever loved,” Sheera replied.

“That’s what infuriates me; that you and he should be enslaved and humiliated—he by the mines and the lash, you by the base uses of the barracks. That you should stoop to using a—a violent clodhopper who can keep neither his eyes nor his hands off those who are fighting for their city ...”

“I assigned Amber Eyes to him,” Sheera corrected diplomatically. “She didn’t object.”

“He could have had the decency to have left her alone!”

Sheera laughed. “Oh, really, Dru! Think how insulted she would have been!”

He could almost see the sensitive lips pinch up. “I’m sure that was his only consideration,” Drypettis retorted with heavy sarcasm, and a moment later he heard the soft boom of the closed door. Then Sheera’s footfalls approached, slow and tired, and she stood framed in the darkness of the potting room doorway.

Sun Wolf hooked a stool from under the workbench and pushed it toward her with his foot. She looked worn and stretched, as she always did these days when one of the girls from the mines brought her news of Tarrin. She ignored the proffered seat.

“If she hates me that much,” the Wolf said, holding his hands to the luminous coals, “why does she stay? She’s free to quit the troop and she’d be no loss.”

Sheera’s mouth tightened, and an angry glint flickered in her eyes. Stripped for training, she held an old blanket wrapped about her shoulders, its thick folds muffling the strong shape of her body. “I suppose that you, as a mercenary, would judge everyone by your own standards,” she retorted. “It’s inconceivable to you that, no matter what someone’s personal feelings about her leadership are, she could remain out of loyalty to a higher goal. Like me—like all of us.” She jerked her head back toward where the half-seen shapes of Denga Rey and Amber Eyes could be distinguished, talking quietly at the far end of the room. “Drypettis is a citizen of Mandrigyn. She wants to see her city proud and free—”

“The fact that she’s the governor’s sister couldn’t have anything to do with her staying, could it?” Sun Wolf rasped.

Sheera sniffed scornfully. “Derroug could find a hundred better spies.”

“Whom you trust?”

“Who are more acceptable to your tastes, anyway,” Sheera snapped back at him. “She may be a hideous snob; she may be unreasonably obstinate; she may be rigid and vain and prudish beyond words; but I’ve known her all my life, since we were girls in school together. She wouldn’t betray us.”

“She could betray us by being too self-involved to know what she’s doing.” He moved his shoulders, rubbed the aching muscles of his neck, and encountered, as he did a dozen times a day, the steel of the slip-chain that lay around his throat like a noose.

“Whatever else she is, she isn’t stupid.”

“She’s a weak link.”

“Not in this case.”

He swung back toward her. “In any case,” he snapped. “You all have weaknesses of one kind or another. It’s a commander’s business to know what they are and take them into account. A single unstable member could wreck the whole enterprise, and I say that woman is about as unstable as any I’ve ever seen.”

“It would be an insult to throw her out of the troop at this point without cause,” Sheera retorted hotly. “When it was only a matter of organization, she was virtually second in command. ..”

“Or is it that you just like having a faithful disciple?”

“As much as you hate not having one.” She was angry now, carnelian reflections of the fire leaping in her eyes. “She’s been loyal to me, not only as a conspirator but as a friend.”

“As commander—”

Her voice gritted. “May I remind you, Captain, that I am the commander of this force.”

The silence between them was as audible as the twang of an overstrained rope. In the ruddy light, her eyes seemed to bum with the reflected fires of the brazier. But whatever words would have next passed between them were forestalled by the opening of the orangery doors and the joking voices of Crazyred and Erntwyff Fish. “So he says, ‘What cheap bastard gave you only a copper?’ And she says, ‘What do you mean? They all gave me a copper.’”

The women were coming in for the second class. After a long moment, Sheera turned on her heel, her blanket swirling like a cloak with her steps, and went to speak to them, leaving Sun Wolf standing silent in the potting room, looking out at her through the frame of the dark door.

The next morning he left the house at dawn to seek the witch Yirth in the city.

He had the impression of having seen Yirth several times since they had spoken in his loft on the night of that first meeting, but he would have been hard pressed to say precisely where or when. She was a woman adept at making herself unnoticed. No small fear, he thought rather crudely, for someone that ugly, forgetting that, for all his size, he, too, had a talent for staying out of sight. He had hesitated to seek her out, knowing that it was in truth her hand, not Sheera’s, that held the choke rein on his life. Moreover, he was not entirely certain that he would be able to find her.

As soon as curfew lifted, he went out, leaving Amber Eyes curled unstirring in his bed, and took one of the secret exits of the women out of the grounds. The night’s rain had ceased, and the canals lay as opaque as silver mirrors among the moss-streaked walls; the dripping of the rooftrees upon the narrow footpaths and catwalks that bordered the water fell hollow into the stillness of the morning, like the intermittent footsteps of drunken sprites.

He had taken care not to go about in the city too often; Altiokis used mercenary troops as part of the city garrison, and there was always a chance that he would be recognized by one of them. But more than that, there was something in any captured town that made the Wolf uneasy—a sense of being spied upon, a sense that, if he called for help when in trouble, no one would come. The battle at Iron Pass had indeed, as Sheera had said, stripped the city of all that was healthy and decent, and the men whom he met in the streets were mostly cripples, addicts—for Mandrigyn was one of the key ports in the dream-sugar traffic from Kilpithie—or else had a furtive air of shame and deceit about them that made them obviously unsuitable. Even the slaves he saw in the town were a bad crop, the stronger ones having been confiscated as part of the indemnity after the battle and sent with their masters to labor in the mines. Sun Wolf’s health and his size made him conspicuous—and matters were not helped by the several women who had sent unequivocally worded notes to Sheera, requesting a loan of his—unspecified—services.

He crossed through the spiderweb windings of twisting streets and over plank bridges that spanned canals he could have jumped, had there been room on those jammed islets for a running start. On catwalks that paralleled the canals or circled the courtyard lagoons along the second or third storey of the houses that fronted them, crones and young girls were already appearing, to shake out bedding in the damp air and call gossip back and forth across the narrow waters. In the black latticework of alleys, ankle-deep in icy water on the lower islands, he saw the lights going up in kitchens and heard the rattle of ironware and the scrape of metal on stone as ashes were raked. Crossing a small square before the black and silent fortress of a three-spired church, he smelled from somewhere the waft and glory of bread baking, like a ghost’s guiding glimpse of the heaven of the saints.

In the silvery light of morning, the city market was a riot of colors: the rain-darkened crimson of the servants of the rich and the wet blue of country smocks; the somber viridians of spinach and kale and the crisp greens of lettuces; the scarlets and golds of fruits; and the prodigal, cloisonne brightness of pyramids of melons, all shining like polished porcelain under their beading of rain. The smells of sharp herbs and fishy mud smote him, mixed with those of clinging soil and the smoky tang of wet wool; he heard girls’ voices as sweet as the hothouse strawberries they cried and old countrymen’s half-unintelligible patois. Raised as he had been in the barbaric North, Sun Wolf had been a grown man before he had ever seen a city marketplace; and even after all these years, the impact of kaleidoscopic delight was the same.

From a countrywoman in a stall where game birds hung like great feathered mops, he asked the direction of the woman Yirth; and though she gave him a suspicious look from dark old eyes, she told him where Yirth could be found.

The house stood on the Little Island, tall, faded, and old. Like most of the houses there, it was of the old-fashioned style, half timbered and lavishly decorated with carving, every pillar, doorpost, and window lattice encrusted with an extravagant lacework of saints, demons, and beasts, wreathed about with all the flowers of the fields. Bat the paint and gilding had long since worn off them. Standing before the door. Sun Wolf had the impression of being on the edge of a dark and carven wood, watched from beneath the trellised leaves by deformed and malevolent elves. Yet the house itself was severely clean; the shutters that were hinged to every window of its narrow face were darkly varnished, and die worn brick of the step was washed and scraped. He heard his own knock ring hollowly in the fastnesses of the place; a moment later, he heard the light, soft touch of the wizard’s approaching stride.

She stepped aside quickly to let him in. Sun Wolf guessed that few people lingered on that step.

“Did Sheera send you?” she asked.

“No.” He saw the flicker of suspicion cross the sea-colored eyes. “I’ve come on my own.”

The single dark bar of brow deepened in the middle, over the hooked nose. Then she said, “Come upstairs.” On the lower isles, none but the very poorest used the ground floors of their houses for anything except storage.

Yirth’s consulting room was dark, long, and narrow, the tall window at its far end looking out over the greenish light of a canal. Plants curtained it, crowding in pots or hanging like robber gangs all from the same gallows, and the light that penetrated was green and mottled. Around him, the Wolf had a sense of half-hidden things, of clay crocks containing herbs lining the dark shelves, of books whose worn bindings gleamed with wax and gold, and of embryos preserved in brandy and herbs hung in dried and knobby bunches from the low rafters. Unknown musical instruments slept like curious monsters in the corners; maps, charts in forgotten tongues, and arcane diagrams of the stars lined the pale plaster of the walls. The place smelled of soap, herbs, and drugs. He felt the curious, tingling sense of latent magic in the air.

She turned to face him in the tabby shadows. “What did you want?” she asked.

“I want to know what I can give you, or what I can do for you, to have you set me free.” It came to him as he spoke that there was, in fact, nothing that he could give her, for he had quite literally no possessions beyond his sword. A hell of a spot, he thought, for the richest mercenary in the West.

But Yirth only considered him for a moment, her hands folded over the gray web of her shawl. Then she said, “Kill Altiokis.”

His hand slammed down on the long table that divided the room, making the glass bottles there jump, and his voice crackled with anger. “Curse it, woman, that wasn’t your price on the ship!”

The black brow moved; the eyes did not. “It is the price I claim to set you free now,” she responded coolly. “Otherwise, your bargain with Sheera stands. You shall be freed—and paid—when the strike force marches.”

“You know as well as I do that’s insane.”

She said nothing, using her silence against him.

“Damn your eyes, you know that lunatic woman’s going to get every skirt in that troop killed!” he stormed at her. “I’ve worked on those women and I’ve taught them, and some of them will be damned fine warriors in about two years’ time, if they live that long, which they won’t if they go into battle with a green captain. But if she’s stubborn enough to do it, then all I want is to be out of here—to have nothing further to do with it or with her!”

“I fear you have no choice about that,” Yirth replied calmly. She rested her hands on the dark wood of the table; the wan light picked out their knots and sinews, making them hardly human, like the strange, folded shapes of an oak burl. “Men go to war for their own entertainment, or for some other man’s women, only because they must. Altiokis, now—Altiokis is deathless and, being deathless, he is bored. It amuses him to conquer cities. Have you seen what happens to a city under his rule?”

“Not being suicidal,” the Wolf rumbled irritably, “I’ve avoided cities under his rule.”

“Not being a merchant, or the father of children, or a tradesman needing to make his living, you can do that, I suppose,” Yirth returned. “But Tarrin—Tarrin fought for the men who were, and for the generation of men who would not see their children grow up under Altiokis’ rule. He and Sheera seek to free Mandrigyn. But my goal is different. I seek to see the Wizard King destroyed, rooted out, as he rooted out and destroyed the other wizards. We are not insane, Captain—the insane ones are those who let him live and grow.”

“You don’t even know he can be killed,” Sun Wolf said. “He’s been a wizard since before you were born. We don’t even know if he’s a man or a demon or what he is.”

“He’s a man,” she lashed out, coldly bitter.

“Then why hasn’t he died?” the Wolf demanded. “All the magic in the world won’t prolong a man’s life—not for a hundred and fifty years! Else we’d have an army of superannuated wizards from all the ages in the past crawling down the walls like ants. But demons are deathless...”

“He’s a man,” she insisted. “Swollen and corrupt on his own immortality. His desires are a man’s desires—power, lands, money. His caprices are a man’s caprices, not a demon’s. He has found a way—some way—of prolonging his life, indefinitely for all we know. Unless he is stopped, he will continue to grow, and all that he touches will rot.” She turned and strode to the glimmering window, the light catching the pale streaks in her hair, like wood ash in a half-burned fire. “It is his death I seek, whatever the cost.”

“Pox rot you, you’re not even a wizard yourself!” he yelled at her. “You’ve never even gone through this bloody Great Trial I keep hearing about; you haven’t got the strength to blow out his bedroom candles! You’re as big a fool as Sheera is!”

“Bigger,” she bit out, whirling to face him, and Sun Wolf could feel the tension smoking from her, like mist from a pond on a freezing night. “Bigger—because Sheera fights with hope, and I have none. I know what Altiokis is—I know just how great is the gap between his powers and mine. But if he can be drawn into battle, there is a chance, however slim. I will use the might of a freed Mandrigyn to destroy him, as he destroyed my master—as he destroyed my future. If f can do so, I shall be satisfied, though it costs me my life. As a wizard in a town under his rule, I know that it will only be a matter of time before he learns of my existence, and my life would be forfeit then, no matter what I did.”

“And what about the cost to the others?” he stormed at her. “What about their lives that Altiokis will destroy?”

“I thought you cared only about your own, Captain,” she jeered at him. “We all have our motives, as you yourself have said. Without me, they would still fight. Without you, without Sheera, without Tarrin. Without them, I would have found another weapon to wield against the Wizard King. Depend upon it, Captain, you are a part of us, your flesh and your fate sealed to ours. You can no more desert us now than the string can desert the bow. The others do not fully see this; even Sheera understands it only in terms of her own need, as they all do. But late or soon, the Wizard King must be met. And willing, unwilling, knowing or unknowing, you, Sheera, Tarrin, every man in the mines, and every woman in Mandrigyn will play a part of that meeting.”

Sun Wolf stared at her for a moment, silent before her deadly bitterness. Then he said again, “You’re insane.”

But she only looked at him with those eyes like jade and polar ice. She stood like a black-oak statue, framed in the trailing greenery of the window, wrapped in the misty and terrible cloak of her power. She made no move as his storming footfalls retreated down the sounding well of the stair, nor when the door banged as he let himself out into the narrow street.

In black anger, Sun Wolf made his way through the streets of Mandrigyn. He saw now that, even in the unlikely event that he could talk or coerce that hellcat Sheera into releasing him, Yirth would never let her do it. He had heard women called vacillating and fickle, but he saw now that it was only in such matters as were of little moment to them. Given a single target, a single goal, they could not be shaken. It was a race now, he thought, to finish the training of the strike force before someone in the city learned of what was happening.

He traversed the Spired Bridge and turned aside through the Cathedral Square to avoid the dissolving throngs in the market. Morning was still fresh in the sky, the air cold and wet against his face and throat, and the sea birds crying among the heaped pillows of clouds, warning of storms to come. On two sides of the square, bright-colored clusters of silks and furs proclaimed the patrons of the bookbinders’ stalls there; on the third side, a small troop of Governor Derroug’s household guards stood watch over his curtained utter beside the Cathedral steps. The usual sycophants were there. The Wolf recognized Stirk, the harbor master, looking like a dressed-up corpse at a Trinitarian funeral, and the fat brute who was Derroug’s captain of the watch. Above them, the Cathedral rose, its gold and turquoise mosaics glimmering in the pale morning, buttress and dome seeming to be made of gilded light.

As he passed the steps, a voice beyond him called out, “Captain!”

He knew the voice, and his heart squeezed in his breast with fear and fury. He kept walking. If anyone was within earshot, he had best not stop.

Thin and clear as a cat’s mew, Drypettis’ voice called out again. “Captain!”

A quick glance showed him no one close enough to hear. He turned in his tracks, hearing the approaching footsteps down the church’s tessellated ascent and the restive jittering of tangled gold.

Fluttering with veils, like a half-furled pennoncel pinned with gems, the little woman came scurrying importantly up to him. “Captain, I want you to tell Sheera—” she began.

Sun Wolf caught her by the narrow shoulders as if he would shake the life from her. “Don’t you ever,” he said in a soundless explosion of wrath, “don’t you ever address me as captain in public again.”

The prim-mouthed face went white with rage, though she must have known that she was in the wrong. Under the thread-drawn saffron of her puffed sleeves, he felt the delicate muscle harden like bone. “How dare you!” she snarled at him. With a wrench she freed herself of his grip. “How dare you speak to me...”

Anger crackled into him—an anger fed by Yirth’s mocking despair, by Sheera’s stubbornness, and by the dangers that he had long sensed closing around him. Impatiently he snapped, “You’re bloody right I’ll speak to you, if you’re ever stupid enough to...”

She shrank from his pointing finger, pale, blazing, spitting like a cornered cat. The rage in her eyes stopped him, startled, even before she cried, “Don’t you touch me, you lecherous blackguard!”

The clipped, mincing accents of Derroug Dru demanded, “And what, pray, is this?”

Altiokis’ governor had just emerged from the great bronze doors of the Cathedral and was standing at the top of the steps, twisted and elegant against his backdrop of clients. From where he stood, he could look down upon Sun Wolf. “Unhand my sister, boy.”

The guards who had been around the litter were already approaching at a run.