The Ladies of Mandrigyn

4

When Sun Wolf was a boy, he had been stricken by a fever. He had concealed it from his father as long as he could, going hunting with the other men of the tribe in the dark, half-frozen marshes where demons flitted from tree to tree like pale slips of phosphorescent light. He had come home and hidden in the cattle loft. There his mother had found him, sobbing in silent delirium, and had insisted that they call the shaman of the tribe. It all came back to him now, with the memory of parching thirst and restless pain: the low rafters with their red and blue dragons almost hidden under the blackening of smoke; the querulous voice of that dapper, busy little charlatan with the holy bones and dangling locks of ancestral hair; and his father looming like an angry, disapproving shadow beside the reddish, pulsing glow of the hearth. The Wolf remembered his father’s growling voice. “If he can’t throw it off himself, he’d better die, then. Get your stinking smokes and your dirty bones out of here; I have goats who could work better magic than you.” He remembered the shaman’s offended sniff—because, of course, his father was right.

And he remembered the awful agony of thirst.

The dream changed. Cool hands touched his face and raised the rim of a cup to his lips. The metal was ice-cold, like the water in the cup. As he drank, he opened swollen eyelids to look into the face of the amber-eyed girl. The fear that widened her eyes told him he was awake.

I tried to kill her, he thought cloudily. But she tried to kill me—or did she? His memory was unclear. Mixed with the perfume of her body, he could smell the salt flavor of the sea; the creak of wood and cordage and the shift of the bed where he lay told him he was aboard a ship. The girl’s eyes were full of fear, but her arm beneath his head was soft. She raised the cup to his cracked lips again, and he drained it. He tried to stammer thanks but could not speak—tried to ask her why she had wanted to kill him.

Abruptly, Sun Wolf slid into sleep again.

The dreams were worse, a terrifying nightmare of racking, helpless pain. He had a tangled vision of darkness and wind and rock, of being trapped and left prey to things he could not see, of dangling over a tossing abyss of change and loss and terrible loneliness. In the darkness, demons seemed to ring him—demons that he alone could see, as he had always been able to see them, though to others—his father, the other men of the tribe, even the shaman—they had been only vague voices and a sense of terror. Once he seemed to see, small and clear and distant, the school of Wrynde, shabby and deserted beneath the sluicing rain, with only the old warrior who looked after the place in the troop’s absence sweeping the blown leaves from the training floor with a broom of sticks. The smell and feel of the place cried to him, so real that he could almost touch the worn cedar of the pillars and hear the wailing of the wind around the rocks. Then the vision vanished in a shrieking storm of fire, and he was lost in spinning darkness that cut at him like swords, pulling him closer and closer to a vortex of silent pain.

Then that, too, faded, and there was only white emptiness that blended slowly to exhausted waking. He lay like a hollowed shell cast up on a beach, scoured by sun and salt until there was nothing left, cold to the bone and so weary that he ached. He could not find the strength to move, but only stared at the timbers above his head, listening to the creak and roll of the ship and the slap of water against the hull, feeling the sunlight that lay in a small, heatless bar over his face.

They were in full ocean, he judged, and heading fast before the wind.

He remembered the mountains of clouds, standing waiting on the horizon. If the storms hit and the ship went to pieces now, he would never have the strength to swim.

So if would be the crabs, after all.

But that cold, calm portion of his mind, the part that seemed always to be almost detached from his physical body, found neither strength nor anger in that thought. It didn’t matter—nothing mattered. The sway of the ship moved the chip of sunlight back and forth across his face, and he found that he lacked the strength even to wonder where he was—or care.

An hour passed. The sunlight traveled slowly down the blanket that covered his body and lay like a pale, glittering shawl over the foot of the bunk. Like the blink of light from a sword blade, the chased gold rim of the empty cup on the table beside him gleamed faintly in the moving shadows. Footsteps descended a hatch somewhere nearby, then came down the hall.

The door opposite his feet opened, and Sheera Galernas stepped in.

Not the President of Kedwyr, after all, he thought, still with that eerie sense of unconcern.

She regarded him impassively from the doorway for a moment, then stepped aside. Without a word, four women filed in behind her, dressed as she was, for traveling in dark, serviceable skirts, quilted bodices, and light boots. For a time none of them spoke, but they watched him, lined behind Sheera like acolytes behind a priestess at a rite.

One of them was the amber-eyed girl, he saw, her delicate, curiously secretive face downcast and afraid and—what! Ashamed! Why ashamed? The rose-tinted memory of her room in Kedwyr slid through his mind, with the warmth of her scented flesh twined with his. She was clearly a professional, for all her youth... Why ashamed! But he was too tired to wonder, and the thought slipped away.

The woman beside her was as pretty, but in a different way—certainly not professional, at least not about that. She was as tiny and fragile as a porcelain doll, her moonlight-blond hair caught in a loose knot at the back of her head, her sea-blue eyes marked at the corners with the faint lines of living and grief. He wondered what she was doing in the company of a hellcat like Sheera... in the company of any of those others, for that matter.

Neither of the other two women had or would even make die pretense of beauty. They were both tall, the younger of them nearly Sun Wolf’s own height—a broad-shouldered, hard-muscled girl who reminded him of the women in his own troops. She was dressed like a man in leather breeches and an embroidered shirt, and her shaven skull was brown from exposure to the sun. So was her face, brown as wood and scarred from weapons, like that of a gladiator. After a moment’s thought, Sun Wolf supposed she must be one.

The last woman stood in the shadows, having sought them with an almost unthinking instinct. The shadows did nothing to mask the fact that she was the ugliest woman Sun Wolf had ever laid eyes on—middle-aged, hook-nosed, her mouth distorted by the brown smear of a birthmark that ran like mud down onto her jutting chin. Her eyes, beneath a single black bar of brow, were as green, as cold, and as hard as jade, infused with the bitter strength of a woman who had been reviled from birth.

They looked from him to Sheera, and on Sheera their eyes remained.

Though he was almost too tired to speak, Sun Wolf asked after a time, “You kidnap my men, too?” There was no strength in his voice; he saw them move slightly to listen. There was a gritty note to it, too, like a streak of rust on metal, that he knew had not been there before. An effect of the poison, maybe.

Sheera’s back stiffened slightly with the sarcasm, but she replied steadily, “No. Only you.”

He nodded. It was a slight gesture, but all he had strength for. “You going to pay me the whole ten thousand?”

“When you’re done, yes.”

“Hmm.” His eyes traveled over the women again, slowly. Part of his mind was struggling against this paralyzing helplessness, screaming to him that he had to find a means to think his way out of this, but the rest of him was too tired to care. “You realize it will take me a little longer to storm the mines single-handedly?”

That stung her, and those full red lips tightened. The porcelain doll, as if quite against her will, grinned.

“It won’t be just you,” Sheera said, her voice low and intense. “We’re bringing you back to Mandrigyn with us as a teacher—a teacher of the arts of war. We can raise our own strike force, release the prisoners in the mines, and free the city.”

Sun Wolf regarded her for a moment from beneath half-lowered lids, reflecting to himself that here was a fanatic if ever he saw one—crazy, dangerous, and powerful. “And just whom for starters,” he inquired wearily, “are you planning on having in your strike force, if all the men of the city are working in the mines?”

“Us,” she said. “The ladies of Mandrigyn.”

He sighed and closed his eyes. “Don’t be stupid.”

“What’s stupid about it?” she lashed at him. “Evidently your precious men can’t be bothered to risk themselves, even for ready cash. We aren’t going to sit down and let Altiokis appoint the worst scoundrels in the city as his governors, to bleed us with taxes and carry off whom he pleases to forced labor in his mines and his armies. It’s our city! And even in Mandrigyn, where it’s as much as a woman’s social life is worth to go abroad in the streets unveiled and unchaperoned, there are women gladiators like Denga Key here. In other places women can be members of city guards and of military companies. You have women in your forces yourself. Fighting women, warriors. I saw one of them in your tent that night.”

Against the sting of her voice, he saw Starhawk and Sheera again, cool and wary as a couple of cats with the torch smoke blowing about them. Wearily, he said, “Thai wasn’t a woman, that was my second-in-command, one of the finest warriors I’ve ever met.”

“She was a woman,” Sheera repeated. “And she isn’t the only woman in your forces. They said in the city that you’ve trained women to fight before this.”

“I’ve trained warriors,” the Wolf said without opening his eyes, the exhaustion of even the effort to speak weighting him like a sickness. “If some of ’em come equipped to suckle babies later on, it’s no concern of mine, so long as they don’t get themselves pregnant while they’re training. I’m not going to train up a whole corps of them from scratch.”

“You will,” Sheera said quietly. “You have no choice.”

“Woman,” he told her, while that lucid and detached portion of his mind reminded him that arguing with a fanatic was about as profitable as arguing with a drunk and far more dangerous, “what I said about Altiokis still goes. I’m not going to risk getting involved in any kind of resistance in a town he’s just taken, and I sure as hell won’t do it to train a troop of skirts commanded by a female maniac like yourself. And ten thousand poxy gold pieces, or twenty thousand, or whatever the hell else you’ll offer me isn’t about to change my mind.”

“How about your life?” the woman asked, her voice uninflected, almost disinterested. “Is that reward enough?”

He sighed, “My life isn’t worth a plug copper at this point. If you want to chuck me overside, there’s surely no way I can stop you from doing it.”

It was a foolish thing to have said, and he knew it, for Sheera was not a woman to be pushed and she was clearly supreme on this ship, as shown by the fact that she’d gotten its captain to put out to sea at this time of the year at all. It struck him again how absolutely alone he was here and how helpless.

He had expected her to fly into a rage, as she had done in his tent. But she only folded her arms and tipped her head a little to one side, the glossy curls of her hair catching in the stiff embroidery of her collar. Conversationally, she said, “There was anzid in the water you drank.”

The shock of it cut his breath like a garrote. He opened his eyes, fear like a cold sickness chilling the marrow of his bones. “I didn’t drink anything,” he said, his mouth dry as the taste of dust. He had seen deaths from anzid. The worst of them had taken two days, and the victim had never ceased screaming.

The ugly woman spoke for the first time, her low voice mellow as the notes of a rosewood flute, “You woke up thirsty from the arrow poison, after dreams of fever,” she said. “Amber Eyes gave you water to drink.” The long slender hand moved toward the empty cup beside the bed. “There was anzid in the water.”

Horror crawled like a tarantula along his flesh. Sheera’s face was like a stone; Amber Eyes turned away, cheeks blazing with shame, unable to meet his gaze.

“You’re lying,” he whispered, knowing that she was not.

“You think so? Yirth has been a midwife, a Healer, and an abortionist long enough to know everything there is to know about poisons—it isn’t likely she’d have made a mistake. If you hesitate to join us out of fear of Altiokis, I can tell you now that nothing the Wizard King might do to you if our plan fails would be as bad as that death. You have nothing further to lose by obeying us now.”

Weak as he was, he had begun to shake; he wondered how long it took for the symptoms of anzid to be felt. How long had it been since he had been given the poison? It flashed through his mind to take Sheera by that round, golden throat of hers and strangle the life out of her. But weakness held him prisoner; in any case, it would not save his life. And besides that, there was not even sense in cursing her.

When he had been silent for a time, the woman Yirth spoke again, her cold, green eyes looking out from the concealing shadows, clinical and detached. “I am not the wizard that my master was, before Altiokis had her murdered,” she said. “But it still lies within my powers to arrest the effects of a poison from day today by means of spells. When we reach Mandrigyn, I shall place a bounding-spell upon you, that the poison shall not lay hold of you so long as you pass a part of each night within the walls of the city. The true antidote,” she continued, with a hint of malice in that low, pure voice, “shall be given to you with your gold when you depart, after the city is freed.”

The shaking had become uncontrollable. Fighting to keep panic from his voice, he whispered, “You are a wizard yourself, then. The woman who controls the winds.”

“Of course,” Sheera said scornfully. “Do you think we’d have dared consider an assault on Altiokis’ Citadel without a wizard?”

“I don’t think there’s anything you’re crazy enough not to dare!”

It was on his lips to curse her and die—but not that death. He lay back against the thin pillows, his eyes closing, and the trembling that had seized him passed off. He felt as bleached and twisted as a half-dried rag; even the fear seemed to trickle out of him. In the silence, he could hear the separate draw and whisper of each woman’s breath and the faint splash and murmur of water against the hull.

The silence seemed to settle around his heart and brain, white, empty, and somehow strangely calming. He knew he would die, then, hideously, one way or the other. Having accepted that, his mind began to grope fumblingly for ways of playing for time, of getting himself out of this, of fighting his way back to life. Not, he told himself with weary savagery, that I really think there’s a chance of it. Old habits die hard.

And by the spirits of my ancestors freezing down in the cold waters of Hell, I’m going to die a great deal harder.

He drew a tired breath and let it drain from his lips. Something stirred within him, goaded back to feeble and unwilling life, and he opened his eyes and studied the women before him, stripping them with his eyes, judging them as he would have judged them had they turned up, en masse, at the school of Wrynde, wondering if there was muscle as well as curving flesh under Sheera’s night-blue gown and which of them was a good enough shot to hit a man with a birding arrow at fifty yards.

“Damn your eyes.” He sighed and looked at Sheera again. “So who am I supposed to be?”

She blinked at him, startled by the sudden capitulation. “What?”

“Who am I supposed to be?” he repeated. Tiredness slurred his voice; he tried to garner his waning energy and felt it slip like fine sand through his fingers. His voice had grown weaker. As if some spell of distance had been broken, the women gathered around him. Amber Eyes and the porcelain doll going so far as to sit on the edge of his bunk. Sheera would not let herself so unbend; she stood over him, her arms still folded, her curving brows drawn heavily down over the straight, strong nose.

“If Altiokis has dragged all the men away in chains,” he continued quietly, “you can’t just have a strange man turn up in your household. Am I your long-lost brother? A gigolo you picked up in Kedwyr? A bodyguard?”

The porcelain doll shook her head. “We’ll have to pass you off as a slave,” she said, her voice low and husky, like a young boy’s. “They’re the only men whose coming into the city at this time of the year can well be accounted for. There won’t be any merchants or travelers in winter.”

She met the angry glitter in his eyes with cool reasonableness. “You know it’s true.”

“And in spite of the fact that you find it demeaning to be a woman’s slave,” Sheera added maliciously, “you haven’t really got any say in the matter, now, have you. Captain?” She glanced at the others. “Gilden Shorad is right,” she said. “A slave can pass pretty much unquestioned. I can get the ship’s smith to put a collar on you before we reach port.”

“What about Derroug Dru?” Amber Eyes asked doubtfully. “Altiokis’ new governor of the town,” she explained to Sun Wolf. “He’s been known to confiscate slaves.”

“What would he want with another slave?” Denga Rey the gladiator demanded, hooking her square, brown hands into the buckle of her sword belt.

Gilden Shorad frowned. “What would Sheera want with one, for that matter?” she asked, half to herself. Close to, Sun Wolf observed that she was older than he had at first thought—Starhawk’s age, twenty-seven or so. Older than any of the others except the witch Yirth, who, unlike them, had remained in the shadows by the door, watching them with those cool, jade eyes.

“He can’t simply turn up as a slave without any explanation for why you bought him,” the tiny woman clarified, tucking aside a strand of her ivory hair with deft little fingers.

“Would you need a groom?” Amber Eyes asked.

“My own groom would be suspicious if we got another one suddenly,” Sheera vetoed.

She looked so perplexed that Sun Wolf couldn’t resist turning the knife. “Not as easy as just hiring your killing done, is it? You married?”

A flush stained her strong cheekbones. “My husband is dead.”

He gave her a stripping glance and grunted. “Just as well. Kids?”

The flush deepened with her anger. “My daughter is six, my son, four.”

“Too young to need an arms master, then.”

Denga Rey added maliciously, “You don’t want anyone in that town to see you with a sword in your hand anyway, soldier. Old Derroug Dru suspects anybody who can so much as cut his meat at table without slitting his fingers. Besides, he’s got it in for big, buff fellows like you.”

“Wonderful,” the Wolf said without enthusiasm. “Leaving aside where this strike force of yours is going to practice, and where you’re going to get money for weapons...”

“We have money!” Sheera retorted, harried.

“I’ll be damned surprised if you’ll be able to find weapons for sale in a town that Altiokis has just added to his domains. How big is your town place? What did your late lamented do for a living?”

By the bullion stitching on her gloves, the poor bastard couldn’t have been worth less than jive thousand a year, he decided.

“He was a merchant,” she said, her breast heaving with the quickening of her anger. “Exports—this is one of his ships. And what business is it of yours—”

“It is my business, if I’m going to be risking what little is left of my life to teach you females to fight,” he snapped. “I want to make damned sure you don’t get gathered in and sent to the mines yourselves before I’m able to take my money and your poxy antidote and get the hell out of that scummy marsh you call a town. Is your place big enough to have gardens? An orangery, maybe?”

“We have an orangery,” Sheera said sullenly. “It’s across the grounds from the main house. It’s been shut up for years—boarded up. It was the first thing I thought of when I decided that we had to bring you to Mandrigyn. We could use it to practice in.”

He nodded. There were very few places where orange trees could be left outdoors year-round, yet groves of them were the fashion in all but the coldest of cities. Orangeries tended to be large, barn like buildings—inefficient for the purpose of wintering fruit trees for the most part, but just passable as training floors.

“Gardeners?” he asked.

“There were two of them, freedmen,” she said and added, a little defiantly, “They marched with Tarrin’s army to Iron Pass. Even though they had not been born in Mandrigyn, they thought enough of their city’s freedom to—”

“Stupid thing to do,” he cut her off and saw her eyes flash with rage. “There a place to live in this orangery of yours?”

In a voice stifled with anger, she said, “There is.”

“Good.” Tiredness was coming over him again, final and irresistible, as if argument and thought and struggle against what he knew would be his fate had drained him of the little strength he had. The wan sunlight, the faces of the women around him and their soft voices, seemed to be drifting farther and farther away, and he fought to hold them in focus. “You—what’s your name? Denga Rey—I’ll need you for my second-in-command. You fight during the winter?”

“In Mandrigyn?” she scoffed. “If it isn’t pouring sideways rain and hail, the ground’s not fit for anything but boat races. The last fights were three weeks ago.”

“I hope you were trounced to within an inch of your life,” he said dispassionately.

“Not a chance, soldier.” She put her hands on her strong hips, a glint of mockery in those dark eyes. “What I wonder is, who’s going to look after all those little trees so it looks as if there’s really a gardener doing the job? If Sheera buys one special, somebody’s going to get suspicious.”

Sun Wolf looked up at her bleakly. “I am,” he said. “I’m a warrior by trade, but gardening is my hobby.” His eyes returned to Sheera. “And I damned well better draw pay for it, too.”

For the first time, she smiled, the warm, bright smile of the hellcat girl she hadn’t been in years. He could see then why men had fought for her hand—as they must have done, to make her so poxy arrogant. “I’ll add it in,” she said, “to your ten thousand gold pieces.”

Sun Wolf sighed and closed his eyes, wondering if it would be wise to tell her what she could do with her ten thousand gold pieces. But when he opened them again, he found that it was dark, the afternoon long over, and the women gone.