The Ladies of Mandrigyn

6

This is a sword, Sun Wolf said. You hold it by this end.”

He glared at the dozen women who stood in a line before him, all of them wheezing with the exertion of an hour of warming-up and tumbling exercises that had convinced them, as well as their instructor, that they’d never be warriors.

“You.” He pointed to Gilden Shorad’s partner-in-crime, the tiny, fragile-looking Wilarne M’Tree. She stepped forward, bright, black eyes raised trustingly to his, and he tossed the weapon to her hilt-first. She fielded it, but he saw by the way she caught herself that it was heavier than she’d been ready for.

He held out his hand and snapped his fingers. She threw it back awkwardly. He plucked it out of the air with no visible effort.

“You’re going to be working with weighted weapons,” he told them, as he’d told the two groups he had worked with last night and would tell another group later on tonight. “That’s the only way you can build up the strength in your arms.”

One of the women protested, “But I thought we—”

He whirled on her. “You ask for permission to speak!” he snapped.

Her face reddened angrily. She was a tall, piquant-faced woman with the red-gold hair of a highlander, her breasts small under their leather binding, her legs rather knock-kneed in her short linen drawers, the marks of past pregnancies printed on the muscleless white flesh of her belly. After a moment, she said in a stifled tone, “Permission to speak, sir.”

“Permission granted,” he growled.

Permission to speak, he had found, was one of the best ways to break the first rush of hasty words. Most recruits didn’t know what they were talking about, anyway.

It worked in this case. Her first outburst checked, the woman spoke in sullenness rather than in outrage. “I thought we were training for a—a surprise attack. A sneak attack.”

“You are,” Sun Wolf said calmly. “But if something goes wrong, or if you’re trapped, you may have to take on a man with a sword—or several men, for that matter. You may have to hold off attackers from the rest of the party or maintain a key position while the others go on. You won’t just be fighting for your own life then, you’ll be fighting for everybody’s.”

The woman stepped back, blushing hotly and greatly discomfited. With instinctive tact, the Wolf turned to the other women. “That goes for all of you,” he told them gruffly. “And for anything I teach. I was hired because I’m a warrior—I know what you’re going to run up against. Believe me, everything I teach you has a purpose, no matter how pointless it seems. I can’t take the time to explain it to you. Do you understand?”

Cowed, they nodded.

He bellowed at them, “Don’t just stand mere bobbing your heads up and down! I can’t hear your brains rank at this distance! Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Gilden and Wilarne hastened to reply.

He glared at the group of them. “What?”

All of them chorused this time. “Yes, sir.”

He nodded brusquely. “Good.” He jerked his thumb at the weapons that lay amid a pile of sacking in one comer of the dimly lighted orangery. “There are your weapons. Along the wall you’ll find posts embedded in the floor.” He pointed to where he had set the posts himself earlier that day, where they would be easily concealable among the old tree rubs and stacks of clay pots. “I want to see your exercise—backhand, forehand, and down, just those three strokes. First just to get the hang of your sword, men as hard as you can, as if you had a man in front of you, out to slice off your heads.”

A few of them looked squeamish at the idea; others started eagerly for the weapons. Sun Wolf roared, “Get back into ranks!”

They did—quickly. The tall woman looked as if she might speak, but thought better of it.

“Nobody breaks ranks until I give the order,” he barked at them. “If you were my men, I’d smarten you up with a switch. As it is, all I can do is throw you out on your pretty little arses before you endanger the rest of the troop by failure to obey orders. If I tell you to stand in ranks and then I walk out of the room and take a nap, I’d better find you still in ranks and on your feet when I get back, even if it’s the next morning. You understand?”

“Yes, sir,” they sang out.

“Now go!” He clapped his hands, and the echoes of it were still ringing in the high rafters as the women scattered to obey.

Behind him, a woman’s voice remarked, “You’re being nice to them.”

He glanced back and met Denga Rey’s dark, sardonic eyes. Like him, and like most of the women, the gladiator was stripped for exercise, and her brown body was marked with scars of varying age. The feeble lamplight flashed on the bald arch of her skull.

He grunted. “If you call that ‘nice’ you have a different standard of it than I do, woman.”

“After the gladiators’ school,” the warrior returned equably, “you’re a lover’s caress—and I think we’ve got the same standard, soldier.”

He studied her in silence for a moment. She was younger than he’d first thought, probably not more than twenty-one or twenty-two, a big, dark mare of a girl with belly muscles as ridged and ripply as a crocodile’s back. In her alternation of silence and mockery on the voyage, he had sensed her animosity toward him and had wondered what he would do if his only possible second-in-command hated him because she was not first. He knew himself to be an intruder to the organization, whether against his will or not. Sheera was still clearly in command, but he had usurped a spot only slightly below hers; no matter how much they needed him, there was bound to be ill will. He had just been wondering whether it would come down to a physical confrontation between himself and the gladiator when, for reasons of her own, she had apparently decided to accept him; but occasionally he still caught her watching him with a strange gleam in her dark eyes.

“There’s no point in taking it out on them because I was dragooned into this lunacy,” he said at last. Then, nodding toward them, he asked, “What do you think of them?”

She grinned. “They’re rather sweet,” she said. “Six months ago, you’d never have got a sword into their dainty little mitts. But since the men have been gone, they’ve been learning that they can work—not just these women, or the women in the conspiracy, but all of them. They’re running the shops, the farms, and the banking and merchant concerns as well. I think some of them, like our Gilden, even enjoy having a blade in their hands.”

He admitted grudgingly, “I will say this for them—they did turn out. That surprised me. Most people will put up all the money you want, from a safe distance.”

She shrugged her shoulders, the muscles of them shining like brown hardwood. “They did put up a phenomenal amount of money, you know,” she remarked. “For all that little Drypettis gets under my skin, she’s a damned good organizer when it comes to the tin side of an operation. She was responsible for that end of it.”

“Was she?” His eyes traveled down the line of sweating women, hacking doggedly at their posts, as he searched out Sheera’s pint-size disciple.

“Of course. She’s still the one who holds the purse strings of the operation. When it was just a question of hiring you and your men, she was Sheera’s number two person. It’s Dru who’s kept that damned brother of hers off our backs, too,” she added, flicking a speck of dust from the worn black leather of her breast guard. “She’s done one hell of a lot for the organization—but damn, that pinch face of hers sticks in my craw. If Sheera hadn’t pointed out to her that what we were doing was a military operation, I don’t think she’d ever have spoken to me.”

His eyes narrowed as they returned to that straight, rigid back and the long tail of thick brown hair that dangled between those slender shoulders.

Not Denga Rey. It was Drypettis whom he had supplanted.

From what he’d seen of her, she wasn’t likely to take kindly to being ousted from her place as Sheera’s advisor and relegated to mere trooper—the more so because she was not that good a trooper. He remembered her expression on the wharf when Denga Rey, Amber Eyes, and their rowdy friends had rioted past, whistling at him like a crowd of sailors ogling a girl—an expression not only of embarrassed rage but also almost of pain at having to associate with such people at all.

Politics makes strange bedfellows and no error, he thought and wondered again how these disparate women had ever come together in the first place.

“And what about you?” he asked Denga Rey as the gladiator stood, scarred arms folded, surveying their joint charges. “How’d a nice girl like you end up in a place like this?”

Her eyes mocked him. “Me? Oh, I’m in this only for the sake of die one I love.”

He stared at her in surprise. “You have a man up in the mines?” It was the last thing he would have expected of her.

The curved, black eyebrows shot up; then she burst into a whoop of delighted laughter. “A man? she choked, her eyes dancing. “You think I’d do this for a man? Oh, soldier, you kill me.” And she swaggered off, chuckling richly to herself.

Sun Wolf shook his head and turned his attention back to the laboring women. The hard maple of the practice posts was barely chipped—none of them seemed to have any idea how to hold or use a sword. He rolled his eyes briefly heavenward, as if seeking advice from his ancestors—not, he reflected, that any of the lunatic berserkers whose seed had spawned him had ever found themselves in the position of teaching a bunch of soft-bred and lily-handed ladies the grim arts of war. Then he went patiently down the line, correcting grips that would surely have cost the wielders their weapons at the first blow, if they didn’t break their wrists in the bargain.

Most of the young men who had come to him in Wrynde, singly or in small troops, were not novices. They had handled swords, if only in the more gentlemanly arts of dueling or militia training. Their muscles were hardened from the sports of boys or from work. A fair number of these women—the wealthier ones especially—had very dearly done neither sports nor work since childhood. Their bodies, as he viewed them with a critical eye that brought blushes to the cheeks of those who noticed the direction of his gaze, might be trim enough, but their flesh was slack.

He shook his head again. And they expected to be able to storm the mines! He only hoped to be far along the road to Wrynde when they tried it.

He went back along the line, patiently correcting strokes.

Many of them shied from his touch, having been trained to walk veiled and downcast in the presence of men. The tall woman who had challenged him was red-faced and missish; Gilden Shorad, coldly businesslike; Wilarne M’Tree, grave and trusting. Drypettis jerked violently from his correcting hand, and for a moment he saw in her eyes not only a jealous hatred but terror as well. A virgin, he thought. It figures. And likely to remain that way, for all her prettiness.

Gently, he held out his hand for the sword and demonstrated the proper way to use it. Those huge, pansy-brown eyes followed the movements of his hand devouringly, without once straying to either his body or his face. Her cheeks were scarlet, as if scalded.

For all that she was a tough little piece, and grittily determined to do well, she was another one, Sun Wolf thought, whom he’d have to watch.

It was only at Sheera’s insistence that she had been included in the troop at all.

The first muster of women had yielded over a hundred, of whom he had cut almost half on the spot. Some of them had been dismissed purely for physical reasons—fatness, or that telltale pallor of internal pain that marked old childbirth injuries. Many of them he’d cut because of the obvious signs of drunkenness or drug addiction. Four girls he had rejected simply because they were thirteen years old, though they had sworn, with tears, that they were fifteen and their mothers knew where they were. Three women he had dismissed, as tactfully as he could, because his instincts and a very short observation told him that they were quarrelsome, people who fomented discord either for their own amusement or simply unconsciously, as if they could not help it. The female version of this was less physical than that of the male, but the result was the same. In a secret command, troublemakers were not to be tolerated.

The women who were left were mostly young, the wives of craftsmen and laborers, though there was a fair sprinkling of merchants’ wives of varying degrees of wealth. About a dozen were whores, though privately. Sun Wolf did not expect most of them to stay the course. Enormous experience in the field had taught him that most women who sold themselves for a living lacked either discipline or the strength to control their lives—and he suspected this to be true even of those whom he had not rejected out of hand for drinking or drugs. One of the women in the final group that remained was a nun, an elderly woman who’d been the Convent baker for twenty years and had a grip like a blacksmith’s. He thought of Starhawk and smiled.

Those who were left he had divided into four groups, with instructions to report on alternate nights, either a few hours after sunset or at midnight. With luck, this arrangement would keep Sheera’s townhouse and grounds from being obviously the center of activity, for there were three or four ways into the compound, and others were being devised. Yirth had sworn a death curse upon betrayal from within, and the women had sworn fellowship with one another and loyalty to Sheera.

They were as safe as they could be, given the appalling circumstances, but Sun Wolf looked down the line of those white, sweating, sluglike bodies with no particularly sanguine hopes of success.

The women slipped quietly away from the bathhouse at the bottom of the grounds nearly two hours later, gowned once more as the respectable matrons or maidens they had been before they took up the study of arms. From the dark door of the orangery, Sun Wolf watched them, brief shadows against the dull, reddish glow from the pavilion’s windows, seeking passages, posterns, plank bridges over the canals, and the narrow back streets that would lead them to gondolas tied up in secluded courtyard lagoons. Light rainfall pattered on the bare, gray stems of the deserted garden. Beyond the walls, the lapping of the canals formed the murmurous background music to all life in that watery city.

The water clock in the dim room behind him told him that it would shortly be midnight. The women of the next group would appear soon.

The cold dampness bit into the bare flesh of his shoulders and legs, and he turned back into the silent wooden vaults of the orangery itself.

Sheera was there, wrapped in a shawl of flame-colored wool whose fringes brushed her bare feet. She was dressed for training in short drawers and leather guards, and her dark eyes were angry.

“Do you have to run them so hard?” she demanded shortly. “Some of them are so exhausted they can hardly stagger.”

“You want to ask ’em whether they’d rather be exhausted now or slaughtered to the last woman later on?”

Her face reddened. “Or are you trying to run them all out, in the hopes that I’ll give up my plans to free the men from the mines?”

“Women, I’ve learned by this time it’s no use hoping you’ll give up any plan that you’ve come up with, no matter how witless it is,” he snapped at her, walking over to the room’s single brazier of charcoal to rub his hands over the molten glow of the blaze. “If those women can’t take it, they’d better get out of the army. We don’t know what kind of resistance you’ll meet with up in the mines. Since you’ve made me the instructor, I’m damned well going to prepare those women for anything.”

“There’s no need to—” she began hotly.

“There is, unless they train more than a couple of hours every other night!” He swung back to face her, the reflection of the fire edging him in a line of gold. “And considering that you couldn’t come up with more than fourteen swords...”

“We’re doing what we can about that!” she retorted. “And about finding somewhere else to practice during the daytime. But the first thing Derroug Dru did when he came to power was collect every weapon in the city—”

“I told you that in the beginning.”

“Shut up! And he has spies everywhere within the walls.”

“Then meet outside the city.”

“Where?” she lashed out viciously.

With silky sweetness he replied, “That’s your affair, madam. I’m only your humble slave, remember? But I’m telling you that if those women don’t get more training than they’re getting, they’ll never be soldiers.”

“Do you sometimes wonder if Sheera is crazy?” he asked Amber Eyes, much later, as the pale glow of the sinking moon broke through the clouds to filter through the loft window and touch the fallow gold of her hair. It lay like a river of silk over his arm and chest, almost white against the brown of his skin.

She considered the matter for a moment, a grave look coming into those usually dreamy, golden eyes. Bedroom eyes, he called them, gentle and a little vulnerable, even when she was wielding a sword. At length she said, “No. At least, no crazier than the rest of us.”

He shifted his shoulders against the pillow. “That isn’t saying much.”

She turned her head, where it lay in the crook of his arm, and studied him for a moment, a tiny frown creasing her brow. The moonlight glimmered on the thread-fine chain of gold that encircled her throat, its shadow like a delicate pen stroke where it crossed the tiny points of her collarbone and vanished into the softer shadows of her hair.

The night of the first meeting in the orangery, when he had come up the stairs, she had been here, waiting, sitting on the edge of the narrow bed, clothed only in that heavy golden mane. Never one to question opportunity, Sun Wolf had taken her—that night and on the two nights since. He occasionally wondered why she had come to him, since she was obviously afraid of him; but aside from the love talk of her trade, she was a silent girl, enigmatic and evasive when he spoke to her.

Tonight was the first time she had treated him like a partner in the same enterprise, rather than a customer.

The orangery below them was silent now, and the garden still but for the incessant whisper of the canal beyond the walls. After a final, inconclusive quarrel with Sheera, Sun Wolf had gone to the bathhouse, dark after the departure of the women, its only light the soft, red pulsation under the copper boilers. By this dim glow, he’d stripped, left his clothes on the baroque, black and gilt marble bench in the antechamber, washed, and then swum for a time in the lightless waters of the hot pool.

It had eased his muscles, if not his feelings.

When Amber Eyes had been too long silent, he said, “She’s crazy if she thinks she’s going to rescue this Prince Tarrin safe and sound. Oh, I know someone’s supposed to have seen him alive, but they always say that of a popular ruler.”

“Oh, no.” She sat up a little, those gold kitten eyes very earnest in the wan moonlight. “I’ve seen him. In fact, I delivered a message to him only a few weeks ago, the last time I was up in the mines making maps.”

Sun Wolf stared at her. “What?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “We’ve all seen him—Cobra, Crazy-red ...” She named two of the other courtesans in the troop. “Plus a lot of the girls you cut—the pros, I mean. How else could we let him know what’s going on here?”

“You mean,” Sun Wolf said slowly, “you’ve been in communication with the men all along?”

“Of course.” Amber Eyes sat up with a swift, compact lightness and shook out the splendid pale gold mane around shoulders that gleamed like alabaster in the shadows. She seemed to forget the languid grace of a courtesan and hugged her arms around her knees. “I expect Sheera didn’t want to tell you about it,” she added frankly, “but that end of the organization was set up—oh, long before we went to fetch you.”

The disingenuous phrase made him smile. For all her shy appearance, when she wasn’t hiding behind what Sun Wolf thought of as her professional manner, Amber Eyes could be disarmingly outspoken. He’d seen it in her dealings with other women in the troop. It was as if she showed to men—to her customers—only what they thought they wanted to see.

“Did Sheera set that up?” he wanted to know.

She shook her head. “This was before Sheera and Dru got into it. It came about almost by chance, really. Well, you know that the city was very hard hit, with the men gone. We—the pros—didn’t feel it emotionally so sharply, except for those who had regular lovers who had marched with Tarrin. But I remember one afternoon I went to Gilden’s hairdressing parlor—all of us who can afford the prices go to Gilden and Wilarne—and she said that her own husband had been killed, but that Wilarne didn’t know whether Beddick—her husband—was alive or dead. Gilden said that many others were in the same situation. Wilarne was half distracted by grief—not that Beddick was anyone to compose songs about, mind you—and I said I’d see what I could learn. So I went riding in the foothills near one of the southern entrances to the mines that looks out onto Iron Pass and I let my horse get away from me and pretended to sprain my foot—the usual.” She smiled with remembered amusement. “The superintendent of that end of the mines was very gallant.

“After that it was easy. The next time I went up, I brought friends. The superintendents of the various sections of the mines and the sergeants of the guards don’t get into town often. It’s forbidden to them to have women up to the barracks, but who’s going to report it? Gilden and I were able to set up a regular information service that way, getting news of who was dead and who was alive—Beddick the Bland for one, and, eventually, Tarrin.”

Her face clouded in the veiled moonlight. “That was how Sheera came into it in the first place. She’d heard that there was a way of getting news. She got word to me through Gilden. By that time we had girls going up almost every day and we were starting to pass messages in code. Tarrin, it turned out, was starting to organize the miners already, passing messages from gang to gang as they were taken here and there to different work sites in the mines. The men are taken from one place to another in darkness, so they haven’t any clear idea of where they are in the tunnels; if a man wanders away from his gang, he can wander in the deeper tunnels until he dies. The tunnels arc gated, too, and locked off from one another. But they were starting to work up maps by the time we got in touch with them. On our end, we’d already begun to make maps of the mine entrances, the guardrooms, and where the main barracks are that guard the tunnels from the mines up into the Citadel of Grimscarp itself.”

Sun Wolf frowned. “There are ways from the Citadel down into the mines?”

“That’s what the miners say. It’s because the Citadel’s so inaccessible from the outside—it’s very defensible, of course, but because of the way it’s placed, on the very edge of the cliff, the road from Racken Scrag—the Wizard King’s administrative town at the other end of Iron Pass—has to tunnel through a shoulder of the mountain itself even to get to the gates. Since it was so expensive to bring food up the Scarp, they connected that tunnel directly with the mines; now they haul the food straight up from Racken through the mountain itself. The ways into the Citadel from the mines are said to be heavily guarded by magic and illusion.”

“But if you women storm the mines,” the Wolf said grimly, “Altiokis can send his troops right down on top of you directly from the Citadel. Isn’t that right?”

“Well.. .”Amber Eyes said unhappily. “If we strike quickly enough...”

“Wonderful.” He sighed and slumped back against the pillows. “More battles have been lost because some fool of a general was basing his plans on ‘if this or that.’”

“We do have Yirth, though,” the girl said defensively. “She can protect us against the worst of Altiokis’ magic and spot his illusions.”

“Yirth.” He sniffed, his fingers involuntarily touching the metal links of his chain. “Thai’s how she got into this, isn’t it?”

“Well, yes.” Amber Eyes looked down at her hands, restlessly pleating a corner of the sheet between her fingers. Outside, a wind-tossed branch scratched like a ghoul’s fingers at the roof. The lantern on a passing gondola reflected in a watery smear of dark gold against the window’s rippled glass.

“It was Sheera who brought Yirth into it,” she said at length. “We all knew Yirth, of course—I don’t think there’s a woman in the city who hasn’t gone to her for contraceptives, abortions, love philters, or just because she’s the only doctor in the city who’s a woman. Sheera was one of the very few who knew she was a wizard. She never had anything to do with the organization when all we did was pass information back and forth.

“But when Sheera came into it—she changed it. Before, it had all been so hopeless. What was the point in communicating with the men in the mines, even if they were men you loved, if there was no hope of their ever getting out? If something went wrong here—if your property was confiscated, or your friends arrested—you couldn’t tell them of it, really, because it would only add to their misery. But Sheera was the one who said that where information could be exchanged, plans could be formed. She gave us hope.

“And then Dru figured out a way that we could get money from the treasury, and they started raising funds to hire mercenaries. And ...” She spread her hands, her fine fingers almost translucent in the ivory moonlight. “Our organization became a part of theirs—and Tarrin’s. Tarrin and the men are still getting us information on the mines, sending it through the skags...”

“The what?” The word was familiar to him from mercenary slang; he knew it to mean the cheapest sort of women who’d sell themselves to hide tanners and garbagemen for the price of a cup of inferior wine.

“The skags.” She widened those soft, mead-colored orbs at him. “You know—the ugly women or the fat ones or the old, flabby ones. The guards think it’s hilarious to throw them to a gang of miners. Some of the slaves down there have been in the mines so long they’re almost beasts themselves.” The delicate lips tightened into momentary hardness, and an anger that he had never seen before flashed in those kitten eyes. “They’ll drag one of these women down and toss her into a slave barracks, say, ‘Have at her, boys,’ and then leave.”

She was silent for a moment, looking out into the distance, drawing the edge of the sheet over and over through her fingers. Outwardly her face was calm, but her rage against the men who had the power to do this—and perhaps against all men—was like a heat that he could feel through her silken skin where it touched his shoulder. And who was he to argue? he wondered bitterly. The memory of things that he himself, or men he had known, had considered funny while half drunk and sacking a city silenced him before her anger.

Then she shrugged and put the anger aside. “But it’s the skags who communicate from gang to gang of the men. Mostly Tarrin’s orders keep them from being abused. The superintendents keep mixing the newcomers, the men of Mandrigyn, in with older miners—there are thousands of them down there—to prevent the men from plotting among themselves. But they only spread the plot. And the rest of us—the ones most of these men wouldn’t let their wives talk to before the war—have gotten maps of the mines and wax impressions of the keys to the gates—you know Gilden’s sister Eo is a smith? She copies the keys—and details of where the armories are.”

He settled his back against the wall and regarded her almost wonderingly in the shadows. Outside, the moonlight was dimming, and the smell of rain blew in through the window like a cold perfume. Limned by the faint light, the girl’s face looked young, almost childlike; he remembered her by candlelight in the rose-scented room in Kedwyr, laughing that soft, throaty, professional laugh as she drew him into the conspiracy’s trap. He realized that it was a compliment to him that she showed him her other face-frank, open, without artifice, the face she showed her women friends. Undoubtedly, it was the face she showed her lover. He found himself wondering if she had a lover, as opposed to a “regular”; or if he, like Gilden’s nameless husband, like Beddick M’Tree, like so many others, had followed Tarrin of the House of Her on that last campaign up to the Iron Pass.

The warm weight of her settled against his shoulder, a gesture of intimacy that was less sexual than friendly, like a cat deciding to settle on his knee. “We’ve been talking too much,” she said, and her professional voice was back, soft and teasing.

“One more question,” he said. “Why are you here?”

She smiled.

He intercepted her reaching hand. “You’re afraid of me, aren’t you?”

He felt her body shift in the circle of his arm; when she answered, her voice was that of a girl of nineteen, scarred by what she was, but frank and without artifice. “I was,” she said. Moonlight tipped her lashes in silver as she looked up at him. “But I didn’t think it was fair for you not to know how things stood with the organization. Dru and Sheera said that the less you knew, the less you could tell anyone. But as for your question...” Her lips brushed his in the darkness. “I have my secrets, too.”

He drew her lo him. As he moved, the links of the chain around his neck jangled faintly in the silence of the dark loft.