The Ladies of Mandrigyn

22

“There isn’t that much more to tell.” Starhawk crossed her long legs and tucked her bare feet up under the tumble of sheets and flowered silk quilts at the end of the bed. Against the dark embroidery of her shirt and the gaily inlaid bedpost at her back, she looked bleached, clean as crystal, remote as the winter sky, with her long, bony hands folded around her knees. “Amber Eyes had a picked squad of the prettiest girls—Gilden and Wilarne were two of them—and they tarted themselves up and went in first, to slit the throats of the gate guards before they knew what was happening. The alarm was out after that, but it was too late to keep the troop out of the mines; once we’d made it to the first of the armories and Tarrin got his men rallied, it was easy.”

Sun Wolf nodded. From long professional association, he understood what Starhawk meant by easy. The women all bore wounds of hard fighting. Twelve of the fifty had died in the darkness of the mines, never knowing whether their cause would succeed or not. But the fight had been straightforward, with a clear goal. He doubted whether either Starhawk or Sheera had ever questioned their eventual victory.

He leaned back against the silken bolsters and blinked sleepily at the primrose sunlight that sparkled so heatlessly on the diamond-paned windows. Waking in this room, he had not been certain of his surroundings. It turned out that this was Sheera’s best guest room, and that amused him. Never in his stay in Sheera’s household had he been permitted inside the main house. He had half expected to wake up in the loft over the orangery again.

Sheera had not yet come.

“She’ll be at the coronation,” Starhawk said. “It killed me to miss it, but Yirth said she’d rather not have you left alone. Yirth stayed with you yesterday when I went to the wedding—Sheera and Tarrin’s, I mean. There was a hell of a dust kicked up over it with the parliament, because Tarrin and Sheera insisted that they be married first and then crowned as joint rulers, rather than have Tarrin crowned King and then take Sheera as Queen Consort.” She shrugged. “Parliament’s meeting this afternoon, and there’ll be a town-wide gorge on free food and wine all night to celebrate. Tomorrow, if you’re up to it, you’ll be received by Tarrin and Sheera in the Cathedral Square.”

He nodded, identifying at last the faint wisps of noise that had formed a background to the room. It was music and cheers, coming from the direction of the Grand Canal. If the town had found time to reorganize itself for celebrations, he realized, he must have been unconscious for longer than he had thought.

He smiled, picturing to himself the jewel-box vaults of the Cathedral of the Three and Sheera in a gown of gold. Drypettis had been more right than she knew. Sheera was worthy to be Queen—but Queen on her own terms and not on any man’s. He was glad she’d achieved it, no matter what the hapless Tarrin had felt on the subject.

“What do you think of her?” he asked. “Sheera, I mean.”

Starhawk laughed. “I love her,” she said. “She’s the damnedest woman I’ve ever met. She’s a good general, too, you know, easily better than Tarrin. She always had her forces at her fingertips—always knew what was going on. Even in the worst of it, getting through the traps that guarded the ways up to the Citadel, she never batted an eye. Yirth showed her the true way, and she followed, through illusion and fire and all hell else. The rest had no choice but to do the same.”

Sun Wolf grinned and reached up to touch the bandage over his eye that would soon be replaced by the patch that he would wear for life. “Even a man’s deepest fear of magic,” he said in his hoarse voice, “isn’t strong enough to make him admit that he’s afraid to follow where a woman leads.”

One of those dark, strong eyebrows moved up. “You think I haven’t capitalized on that ever since you made me a squad captain? One memory I’ll always cherish is the look on the face of Wilarne M’Tree’s husband when they met in the battle in the tunnels. It was a toss-up whether he’d die of a stroke induced by outrage or I’d die laughing. She all but hacked the arm off a mine guard who had him cornered—she’s wicked with that halberd of hers—and he looked as indignant, when he finally recognized her, as if she’d made a grab at him in the street.”

Sun Wolf laughed. “I suspected Sheera would be a good fighting general,” he said. “But sending her green into her first battle—and an underground one involving magic at that—in charge of fifty other people, would be one hell of an expensive way to find out I was wrong.”

“You know,” Starhawk said thoughtfully, “I always did suspect you were a fraud.” The gray eyes met his, wryly amused. “The hardest-headed mercenary in the business...”

“Well, I was,” he said defensively.

“Really?” Her voice was cool. “Then why didn’t you sneak off to Altiokis first thing and offer to trade information about the whole organization for the antidote? It would have got you out.”

Sun Wolf colored strangely in the pale, butter-colored sunlight. In a small voice, he answered her. “I couldn’t have done that.”

She extended her foot like a hand and patted the lump of his knee under the covers. “I know.” She smiled, got to her feet, and walked to the window. The shadows of the lattice crisscrossed her face and her short, sulfurous hair. Over her shoulder, she said to him, “The Dark Eagle says there’s going to be years worth of pickings, with Altiokis’ empire broken up. Tarrin told me this morning they’d gotten news of a revolt in Kilpithie. You know they lynched Governor Stirk—the man Altiokis appointed here in Derroug Dru’s place. There’s already war in the North between Altiokis’ appointees in Racken Scrag and the mountain Thanes. With the fortune Altiokis amassed in a hundred and fifty years, the money will be incredible.”

Her back was to him, only a part of her face visible, edged in the colors of the window; her quiet voice was neutral.

Sun Wolf said, “You know I can’t go back, Hawk.”

She turned to face him. “Where will you go?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. To Wrynde, at first. To let Ari know I’m alive and to turn the troop over to him. To give Fawn money.”

“To pay her off, you mean?”

There was a time when he would have lashed back at those words, no matter who had said them, let alone Starhawk, who had never criticized his dealings with women before. Now he only looked down at his hands and said quietly, “Yes.” After a moment, he raised his head and met her eyes again. “I didn’t treat her badly, you know.”

“No,” the Hawk said. “You never treated any of them badly.”

It was the first time he had heard bitterness—or any other emotion, for that matter—in her voice. Ii both stung him and relieved him, to let him know where she stood.

“Do you blame me for it?” he asked.

“Yes,” Starhawk said promptly. “Completely illogically, since I was the one who never told you that I loved you—but yes.”

Sun Wolf was silent, trying to choose his words carefully. With any of his other women, he would have fallen back on the easier ploys of charm, or excused himself on the grounds of his own philandering nature. But this woman he knew too well to believe that her love for him would keep her by his side if he was anything other than straightforward with her. With any of his other women, he realized that it had not much mattered to him whether they stayed by him or not. The last several months had taught him that he did not want to live without Starhawk in his life.

At last, finding no adequate way to excuse himself, he only said, “I’m sorry I hurt you. I wouldn’t have done it knowingly.” He hesitated, fumbling for words. “I don’t want to have to do this to Fawn, because I know she is fond of me—”

“Fawn,” Starhawk said quietly, “loved you enough to leave the troop and come with me to look for you. She traveled with me as far as Pergemis. She loved you very much, Wolf.”

He heard her use the past tense and felt both sadness for that gentle girl and shame. Shame because he had, in fact, loved Fawn no more than a kitten, no more than he had loved the others—Gilden, Wilarne, Amber Eyes, or any of his concubines before. “What happened in Pergemis?” he asked.

“She married a merchant,” Starhawk replied calmly.

Sun Wolf looked up at her, the expression of hurt vanity on his face almost comical.

Starhawk continued. “Farstep and Sons, spices, furs, and onyx. She said she would rather marry into a firm of merchants than be the mistress of the richest mercenary in creation, and to tell you the truth, I can’t say that I blame her. I was asked to stay there myself,” the Hawk went on in a softer voice. “I thought about it. We had lost so much time, I don’t think she ever thought you’d come out of this alive.”

“She wasn’t alone in that opinion,” the Wolf growled. “Will he be good to her?”

“Yes.” Starhawk thought of that tall stone house near the Pergemis quays, of Pel Farstep in her tall hood and elaborately wrought widow’s coif, and of Ram and Imber and Orris, smoking and arguing in front of the hearth, amid a great brangle of children and dogs. Anyog should never have left there, she thought, and then wondered whether he would have been any happier living among them constantly than she would have been, had she given up her quest and accepted Ram’s love.

She realized she had been too long silent. Sun Wolf was watching her, curious and concerned at the change that had come over her face. She said to him, “They are good people, Wolf. They’re the kind of people whose homes we’ve looted and whose throats we’ve slit for years. I can’t go back to our old life in Wrynde any more than you can.”

She walked back to the bed and leaned her shoulder against the gay carvings of the inlaid pillar, her long fingers lying among the curved patterns of ivory and gold, like something wrought there of alabaster, the strong knuckles and wrinkled, pink war scars like the work of a master craftsman against the alternation of abalone and ebony. “So here we are,” she said ironically. “Your father was right. Wolf. We’ve been spoiled for our trade by love and magic.”

He shrugged, leaning back against the shadowy silk of the many pillows. “Looks as if we’ll have to seek a new trade. Or I will, anyway.”

He reached up and touched the eye bandage again. As he suspected, his depth perception was completely gone. He’d have to retrain himself with weapons to compensate, if he ever wanted to fight again. “Sheera told you what happened to me that night in the pit?” he asked.

Starhawk nodded, without comment.

“Yirth was right. I need to find a teacher, Hawk. I feel the Power within me; there are things that I know I can do, but I dare not. I don’t want to become like Altiokis. I need to find someone to teach me to use my powers without destroying everyone and everything I touch. And the damned thing is, I don’t know where to look. Yirth was cut off from the line of her master’s masters—Altiokis managed to wipe out most of the lines. I’ll have to search—and I have no idea where that search will take me.”

He paused, studying that calm, unexpressive face that watched him in the shadows of the bed canopy. He scanned the strength of its bone structure under the straight reddish mark of a war scar, where once her cheek and jaw had been laid open to the bone, fighting to get him off a battlefield when he’d been wounded, and the cool, smoke-gray eyes that seemed to look at all things—including his soul and hers—with such lucid calm.

Then he gathered all his courage into his hands and asked, “Will you come with me? It will be a long search. It could take years, but...”

“Wolf,” she said softly, “years with you is all I’ve ever wanted,” She came quietly around the end of the bed and into his arms.

He was received by Tarrin and Sheera in a public ceremonial in the Cathedral Square the following day.

The cold and rains of winter had changed, seemingly overnight, into the first breath of spring. The windless balminess of the morning had a frost-edge sparkle to it, but the crowds that filled the square before the Cathedral of the Three all seemed to be wearing flowers on their shoulders, bosoms, and hatbands, like the pledge of beauty to come. Sun Wolf saw that most of the women wore what had come to be called the new mode, the flowing and easy-moving lines introduced by the fighting women. The men, laced into whaleboned and padded doublets, looked as if they were far thinner than they had been when they had worn that finery last. The faces of the men were pale; those of the women, brown.

The thirty-odd surviving members of Sheera’s corps, he saw, were standing in a body at the foot of the Cathedral steps, about where Drypettis had gotten him arrested the morning he had gone to ask Yirth to give him his freedom. Drypettis was not among them, though Starhawk had told him last night that the woman who had betrayed him had come to make her bow to Tarrin at the new King’s official reception into the city. She was, after all, the last representative of the most ancient and honorable House in Mandrigyn.

“I was half afraid she would kill herself,” he had said when Starhawk had told him, remembering the numerous, ugly scenes he had witnessed and heard of between Dm and Sheera. “Not that she didn’t deserve thrashing—but it wouldn’t have done Sheera any good. She was fond of the little snirp.”

Starhawk had shaken her head with a wry grin. “Drypettis is far too vain to kill herself,” she’d said. “In fact, I’m not entirely certain she’s even conscious that she did wrong. She still looked upon war as something that gentlefolk—particularly women—hired the ruder classes to do for them, not go out and do themselves. She honestly thought that Sheera had sullied herself and prostituted her soul by becoming a soldier. No, Drypettis will go to her grave believing herself ill-done-by, walling herself tighter and tighter into her own world of the past glories of her House, and exulting in her reputation as one of the original conspirators to the end.”

On the way to the square, the gondola in which Sun Wolf and Starhawk were riding had passed the House of Dru, the only one of those marble-fronted palaces of the old merchant nobility to be undecorated and without a hundred watchers on every one of its tiered, trellised balconies. As Sheera’s servants had poled the graceful boat past, they had heard music played in one of the rooms above; a single harpsichord, pure, lilting, and disinterested.

The other women were there, massed together as they had been that first night in the orangery, their eyes bright as they followed Sun Wolf’s movements. He saw Wilarne M’Tree with Gilden, Eo, and Tisa. Across the square, he saw a man whom he vaguely recognized as Wilarne’s husband with their stiff-necked, twelve-year-old son, looking haughty and uncomfortable. He thought Wilarne looked worn, her eyes stained with the blue smudges of fatigue. Here was one, at least, whose reunion had been less than peaceful. But she still stood with the women rather than with her family, and her menfolk did not look happy about this in the least.

There were others of the women who looked the same. But Amber Eyes and Denga Rey were like newlyweds in black velvet. Denga Rey glittered in her new panoply as Captain of the City Guards.

Yirth was there, too, standing a little to one side, her bony hands tucked into the star-stitched sleeves of her night-blue gown, her dark hair braided back, her face showing fully in daylight for the first time since the Wolf had known her—perhaps for the first time in her life. Even at a distance, before he realized what had changed about her, he knew she had passed through the Great Trial, sometime while he had been ill, and had grasped the wider understanding of such magic as she had been taught. The change was clear in her carriage and in her sea-colored eyes. Sun Wolf was quite close to her before he realized that the birthmark which had marred her face was gone, leaving only a faint shadow of a scar. It was, he thought, probably the first thing that she had done when she had the Power.

Near the women were the Thanes, and he glimpsed Lady Wrinshardin among them, haughty as an empress in her barbaric splendor, with marigolds in her white hair. Her gaze crossed his, and she winked at him, to the evident scandal of a podgy young man at her side who was obviously her son.

On the other side of the Cathedral steps, the dark-robed members of the parliament were banked, most of them still with the pale complexions and calloused hands of their former trade of deep-rock gold miners. Between the women and the parliament, Tarrin and Sheera stood like snow and flame, blazing with the pride of their love and triumph.

Clothed in the white silk majesty of his office, Tarrin of the House of Her, King of Mandrigyn, was no longer a dusty, quick-moving little man in a grimy loincloth, but a very elegant prince indeed. Against the miner’s pallor of his face, his hair was a golden mane, a shade darker than Amber Eyes’; but of very much the same texture, rough and springing; his eyes were vivid blue. The festoons of lace that fell from his sleeves covered the shackle galls on his wrists. Beside him, Sheera was an idol in bullion-stitched gold, her high, close-fitting lace collar not quite concealing the bandages underneath. Sun Wolf remembered seeing the sword cut on her shoulder and breast when they’d been together in the Citadel and thinking that she would carry the scar to her grave.

Most of the women who had been at the storming of the mines would bear such scars.

Sun Wolf and Starhawk came forward to the foot of the steps. Carpets of eastern work had been laid down on the pavement and on the steps above, crimson and royal blue, scattered with roses and daffodils. The roaring of voices silenced as the rulers of Mandrigyn descended the steps; a hush fell over the square.

Tarrin’s face was set and expressionless as he held out his hands to Sun Wolf. In his right hand was a parchment scroll, the seals of the city dangling from it by purple ribbons; he made no other gesture of welcome.

Sun Wolf took the scroll doubtfully, men glanced at Tarrin, puzzled.

“Read it,” the King said, then swallowed.

Sun Wolf unrolled it and read. Then he looked up from the parchment, too incredulous even to be shocked.

“You what?” he demanded.

Starhawk looked around his shoulder quickly. “What is it?”

Sun Wolf held it out to her. “It’s an order of banishment.”

“It’s what?” She took it, scanned it over, then looked up disbelievingly at the Wolf, at Tarrin, and at Sheera, who stood looking off into the distance, her face an expressionless blank.

Sun Wolf’s single eye glittered, yellow and dangerous; his raw voice was like metal scraping. “I did not ask to come here,” he said quietly to Tarrin, “and in the course of this winter I have lost my eye, I have lost my voice, and I have damned near lost my life five times over.” His voice was rising to an angry roar. “All for the sake of saving your lousy city. And you have the unmitigated and brass-faced nerve to banish me?”

To do him credit, Tarrin did not flinch in front of what ended as a harsh vulture scream of outrage; when he spoke, his voice was quiet. “It was voted upon yesterday in parliament,” he said. “I’m afraid the—the original measure was much more punitive.”

The paper read:

“It means,” Starhawk said, with quiet amusement, into Sun Wolf’s dumbfounded silence, “that you taught the ladies of Mandrigyn to bear arms.”

The Wolf glanced at her and back at the King. Tarrin was looking deeply embarrassed.

“If I hadn’t taught your ladies to bear arms,” the Wolf said in a tight, deadly voice, “you and all the members of your pox-rotted parliament would still be tapping great big rocks into wee small rocks in the dark at the bottom of Altiokis’ mines, without hope of seeing the sunlight again.”

“Captain Sun Wolf,” Tarrin said in his light voice, “believe me, your deeds toward the City of Mandrigyn have earned the gratitude of our citizens, down through many generations. I am sure that once the present social disruptions arrange themselves, the order will be rescinded, and I will be able to welcome you as befits—”

“Social disruptions?” the Wolf demanded.

Behind him, he heard Starhawk give a very unwarriorlike chuckle. “He means,” she said, “that the ladies won’t turn back control of the city, or of the businesses, or go back to wearing veils, and the men aren’t pleased about that at all.”

Tarrin went on. “The social order of Mandrigyn is built upon generations of traditions.” There was a thread of desperation in his voice. “The—repercussions—of your action, laudable and necessary though it was, have brought nothing but chaos and confusion to every household in the city.”

Starhawk’s voice was amused. “I think the men are out for your blood. Chief. And I can’t really say that I blame them.”

“That’s ridiculous!” the Wolf said angrily. “There weren’t above fifty women in the poxy troop! And the women had started to take over running the businesses of the city from the minute the men marched off to fight their witless war! Hell, most of the crew of the ship that brought me here were skirts! And anyway, it wasn’t my idea...”

“The fact remains,” Tarrin said, “that it was you who schooled the women in these—” He glanced at the glowering members of his parliament. “—unseemly arts; and you who encouraged them to consort with gladiators and prostitutes.”

Sun Wolf’s voice was a croaking roar of rage, “And I’m being banished for that?”

“Not only for that,” Sheera said quietly. Under the rose and gold of her painted lids, her eyes were touched with something that was not quite sadness, but not quite cynicism either. “And it isn’t only the men who want to see you go. Captain. Do you have any concept of what has happened in this city? We were all of us raised to participate in a dance—the men to cherish, the women to be cherished in return, the men to rule and work, the women to be protected and sheltered. We knew what we were—we had harmony in those times, Captain.

“We have all passed through a hell of terror and pain, of toil and despair. We—Tarrin and I, and every man and every woman—fought not only for our city but for the dream of that way of life, that dance. We thought that with victory, all that old comfort of being what we were raised to be would be restored. But the men have returned to find the dream that sustained them in the mines forever broken. The women—” She paused, then went on, her voice level and cool. “Most of those women who did not fight did not even want what has happened. They wanted to be free of Altiokis, but not at the price that we have forced them to pay. We have pushed chaos and struggle into their lives without their consent. You yourself, Captain, and your lady, know that you cannot unknow what you know. And even those who fought find victory an ambiguous fruit to the taste.”

As if against his will, the Wolf’s eyes went to where Wilarne’s husband and son stood without her, their eyes both sullen and confused. How many others of the troop, he wondered, would meet with that mingling of outrage and incomprehending hurt? Not only from those close to them, he now saw—not only from the men. Most of the women in the crowd were silent and looked across at him and at the ladies he had trained with wariness and disapproval, with the anger of those who had something taken from them without their consent and who did not want what was offered in return. The seeds of bitterness were sown and could not be picked out of the soil again.

And, logically, he saw that he was the only one they could banish. He was not the disrupter of the dance, but he was the only one of those new and uneasy things that they could dispose of without tearing still further the already riven fabric of their lives.

He looked back at the young man before him, clothed in the stiff white ceremonial garb of the ruler of the city, and felt an unexpected stab of pity for the poor devil who would have to sort out the ungodly mess. At least he and Starhawk could get on their horses and ride away from it—and there was a good deal to be said simply for that. He grinned and held out his hand. Tarrin, who had been watching his face with some trepidation visible beneath his own calm expression relaxed and returned the smile and the handclasp with broken knuckled, pick-calloused Fingers.

“Along with the curses of parliament,” Tarrin said quietly, “I give you my personal thanks.”

“Of the two, that’s what matters.” The Wolf glanced over his shoulder at the sound of hooves clicking on the pavement behind them. The crowd opened in a long aisle, from the steps where they stood to the flower-twined stone lacework of the Spired Bridge, which led toward the Golden Gate of the city and to the countryside beyond. Down it, a couple of pages in the livery of the city were leading two horses, with saddlebags already packed and the Wolf’s and Starhawk’s weapons strapped to the cantles. One of the pages, it amused him to see, was Sheera’s daughter, Trella.

With a mercenary’s typical preoccupation, Starhawk gave one of the saddlebags an experimental prod. It clinked faintly, and Sun Wolf asked, “All ten thousand there?” That was a patent impossibility; no horse in creation could have carried the unwieldy bulk of that much gold,

“The rest of the money will be forwarded to you at Wrynde, Captain,” Sheera said, “as soon as it can be raised by parliament. Have no fear of that.”

Looking from her calmly enigmatic face to the disgruntled countenances of the members of parliament, the Wolf only muttered to Starhawk, “Where have we heard that before?”

She swung lightly into the saddle, her fair hair catching the sunlight like pale silk. “What the hell does it matter?” she asked. “We’re not going back mere, anyway.”

The Wolf thought about that and realized that she was right. He had sold his sword for the last time—like the women, like Starhawk, he was no longer what he had been. “No,” he said quietly. “No, I don’t suppose we are.” Then he grinned to himself, mounting, and reined back to where Tarrin and Sheera still stood at the foot of the steps. Sun Wolf held out his hand. “My lady Sheera?”

Sheera of Mandrigyn came forward and raised her lace-gloved hand for his formal kiss. In former days he would have asked the permission of Tarrin, but the King said no word, and the glance Sheera cast them silenced the parliament, like a spell of dumbness. For the first time since he had seen them together. Sun Wolf noticed that Sheera stood an inch or so taller than Tarrin.

He bent from the saddle and touched her knuckles to his lips. Their eyes met—but if she had any regrets, or wished for things between them to be or to have been other than they were, he could find no trace of it in that serene and haughty gaze. She was Sheera of Mandrigyn, and no one would ever see her with mud and rain and sweat on her face again.

He said softly, “Don’t let the men get your ladies down, Commander.”

She elevated a contemptuous eyebrow. “What makes you think they could?”

The Wolf laughed. He found that he could take a great deal of pleasure in seeing those he loved behave exactly like themselves. “Nothing,” he said. “May your ancestors bless you, as you will bless those who follow you with blood and spirit.”

He reined his horse away; but as he did so, Starhawk rode forward and leaned to take Sheera’s hand. A few words were exchanged; then, in a very unqueenly gesture, Sheera slapped Starhawk’s knee, and Starhawk laughed. She rode back to him at a decorous walk; the crowd moved aside again to let them ride from the city.

As they moved under the flamboyant turrets of the Spired Bridge, Sun Wolf whispered, “What did she say to you?”

Starhawk glanced at him in the shadows, her wide, square shoulders and pale hair silhouetted against the rainbow colors of the throng they had just left. Past her, the Wolf could still see Tarrin and Sheera, two glittering dolls beneath the scintillating bulk of the Cathedral of Mandrigyn.

“She told me to look after you,” the Hawk said.

Sun Wolf’s spine stiffened with indignation. “She told you to look after me ... ?”

Her grin was white in the gloom of the covered bridge. “Race you to the city gates.”

To those standing in the great square of the Cathedral, all that could be heard of the departure of Sun Wolf and Starhawk from the town was the sudden thunder of galloping hooves in the tunnel of the enclosed bridge and, like an echo, a drift of unseemly laughter.