The Ladies of Mandrigyn

7

The problems of weapons and of a secondary place to practice by daylight, away from Derroug Dru’s spies, were solved, not by Sheera’s ingenuity, but by fate, guided presumably by Sun Wolf’s deceased and uproariously amused ancestors.

The Thanelands that lay to the east of Mandrigyn had long been under the governorship of Altiokis; indeed, the haughty and old-fashioned Thanes of the clans that held them had been the first to swear allegiance to the Wizard King. But Altiokis’ realm had spread to the richer cities of the coastlands and had drawn upon the slave-worked veins of gold and silver in the mountains for its wealth. The Thanelands were left, as they had always been, as a useless and sparsely populated backwater. The roads winding into those gray hills from the jumble of taverns and dives of East Shore led nowhere. After the sheep dial grazed on the scraggly grass and heather had been folded hi for the winter, the Thanelands lay utterly empty.

So it was an easy matter for the women to slip across the Rack River in the predawn darkness of a rainy morning and be away from all sight of the city by sunup, to run in the wilderness of whin and peat bogs unobserved.

Freezing wind blew another squall of rain over Sun Wolf’s bare back. In the low ground between the drenched, gray hills, the water lay like hammered silver, just above the freezing point; on the high ground, the rocks made the easiest going, for the wet, bare, winter-tough brambles could scratch even the most liberally mud-armored flesh.

Ahead of him, the main pack of the running women bobbed through the colorless light of the wan afternoon. They were clearly flagging.

Those who hadn’t braided their hair up wore it in slick, sodden cloaks down over their backs. Just ahead of him, a slender woman raised her arms to gather up a soaked blond coil that reached almost down to her shapely backside, her pace slackening as she did so. Sun Wolf, overtaking her in the slashing rain, bellowed, “You going to mess with your poxy hair in battle, sweetheart?”

She turned a startled, flowerlike face upon him, now haggard with fatigue; others, as guilty as she, looked also. He raised his voice into a cutting roar, meant to be heard over the din of battle. “Next person who touches her hair, I’m going to cut it off!”

They ail buckled to and ran harder, arms swinging, knees pumping, leather-bound breasts bouncing, drawers sticking wetly to their bodies in the rain. They had all come to the conclusion, in the course of the last week, that there was not a great deal that Sun Wolf would not do.

And that, he thought grimly as he increased his own pace and forged easily ahead through the pack, was as it should be.

Very few of the women ran well. Tisa did—Gilden Shorad’s leggy fifteen-year-old daughter. So did whatever her name was—a rangy, homely mare of a fisherman’s wife—Erntwyff Fish. So did Denga Rey. The rest of them had been soft-raised, and even the hardiest had neither the wind nor the endurance for sustained fighting.

A few of them, Sun Wolf was amused to note, still suffered agonies of self-consciousness about being near naked in the presence of a man.

He passed Sheera, laboring exhaustedly in the rear third of the field. Her black hair was plastered to her cheeks where it had come out of its braids; she was muddy, wet, gasping, and still enough to stir a man’s blood in his veins. He hoped viciously that she was enjoying training as a warrior.

On the whole. Sun Wolf was surprised at how many had lasted that first week.

A week’s hard training had cut their numbers down to fifty, and it spoke well for their determination that any had remained at all. All of them-maidens, matrons, and those who were neither-had been subjected to the most taxingly rigorous physical training that Sun Wolf could devise; tumbling to train the reflexes and identify the cowards; weights and throwing to strengthen the arms; hand-to-hand fighting, wrestling, or dueling with blunted weapons; running on the hills. These were preliminaries to the more vicious arts of infighting and sneaky death to come.

Women who the Wolf would have sworn would make champions with the best had dropped out; half-pints like Wilarne M’Tree and maladroits like Drypettis Dru were still with them. He could see those two from where he ran, laboring along a dozen yards behind the rest of the pack.

Sun Wolf was rapidly coming to the conclusion that he did not and never would understand women.

Starhawk...

He had always thought of Starhawk as different from other women, even from the other warrior women of his own troop. It was only now, when he was surrounded by women, that elements of her personality fell into place for him, and he saw her as both less and more enigmatic, a woman who had rejected the subjugation these women had been trained in—had rejected it long before her path had crossed his own.

Briefly the memory of their first meeting flitted through his mind; how cold the spring sunlight had been in the garden of the Convent of St. Cherybi, and how strong the smell of the new-turned earth. He saw her again as the tail girl she had been, ascetic, distant, and cold as marble in the dark robes of a nun. He’d forgotten why he’d even been at the Convent—probably extorting provisions from the Mother there—but he remembered that moment when their eyes met and he knew that this woman was a warrior in her heart.

He had never believed that he would miss her as much as he did. Amber Eyes was sweet-natured and supremely beddable, exactly the kind of girl he liked—or had liked, anyway—but it was Starhawk for whom he reached, as a man in danger would reach for his sword. He had never quite gotten over not having her there at his side.

His front runners were cresting the final hill above the copse of woods where they had gathered that morning. They’d covered about two and a half miles—not bad for a first run, for women untrained to it, he thought as he slacked his pace and let himself fall back through the pack once more. He yelled a curse at Gilden, who was flagging, her face the bright fuchsia hue that extremely fair women turned in exhaustion; she staggered into a futile but gratifying attempt at a burst of speed.

He cursed them as he would have cursed his men, calling them cowards, babies, sluts. As he fell back farther in the group, to run beside the grimly stumbling Sister Quincis, he yelled, “I’ve seen Trinitarian heretics run faster than that!”

They broke over the crest of the hill in a spilling wave. Below them, the land lay barren and grayish brown under the sluicing rain, the long snake of silver water in the bottom of the vale reflecting the colorless sky. The brush around it was black, dead with winter. Sun Wolf slowed his pace still further to round in the last of the stragglers. Denga Key, her hard brown muscles shining with moisture, had already reached the mere below.

He yelled after them, “Run, you lazy bitches!” and collected a look from Drypettis that could have been bottled and sold to remove the veneer from furniture. He was almost standing still as Wilarne M’Tree staggered past. He hurried her on her way with a swat on her little round rump.

By the time he reached the growing group around the water, two or three of them had recovered enough breath to begin throwing up.

“You do that in the woods under the leaves where it’s not going to be seen by an enemy scout!” he roared at the green-faced and retching Eo. “You want Altiokis’ spies to follow the stink of you to your hideout? I mean it!” he added as she started to double over again and, seizing her by the back of the neck, he shoved her toward the trees. Others had begun to stumble in that direction already.

To Sheera, for whom it was too late, he ordered, “Clean that up.”

Without a word, for she was far past speech, she gathered up leaves to obey him.

“And the rest of you start walking,” he ordered curtly. “You’ll get chilled if you stand around, and I’m not going to have the lot of you sniveling and fainting on me at practice tonight.”

“Very nice!” A voice, deep and harsh as a crow’s, laughed from the sheltering darkness of the nearby woods. “I had been told that any excuse for a red-blooded male in Mandrigyn had been sent to the mines. I am pleased to see that the reports were exaggerated.”

Sun Wolf swung around. White-faced, Sheera got to her feet. A tall bay horse stepped from the tangled brambles of the thickets. The woman on its back sat sidesaddle, her body straight as a spear. In the shadows of a green oilskin hood, hazel-gray eyes flashed mockingly. The cloak covered most of her, except for the hem of her gown and her gloves, and these were of such barbaric richness as to leave little doubt about her station. The bay’s bridle had cheekpieces of brass, worked into the shape of flowers.

“Marigolds,” Sheera said quietly. “The emblem of the Thanes of Wrinshardin.”

The old woman turned her head with a slow, ironic smile. “Yes,” she purred. “Yes, I am Lady Wrinshardin. The Thane’s mother, not his wife. And you are, unless I am much mistaken, the legendary Sheera Galena, in whose honor my son once wrote such puerile verse.”

Sheera’s chin came up. The thick curls of her black hair plastered wetly to her cheeks, and the rain gleamed on her bare arms and shoulders, which had already turned bright red with cold and gooseflesh. “If your son is the present Thane of Wrinshardin who courted me when I was fifteen,” she replied coolly, “I am pleased to see that your taste in poetry so closely parallels my own.”

There was a momentary silence. Then that mocking smile widened, and Lady Wrinshardin said, “Well. At the time, I presumed that, like most town-bred hussies, you had turned down the chance of wedding decent blood out of considerations of money and the boredom of country life. I am pleased to see that you acted rather from good sense.” The sharp, faded old eyes casually raked the scene before her, taking in the exhausted, bedraggled woman and the big man with the chain about his neck who had not the eyes of a slave.

“I don’t suppose I have ever seen a man chase this many women since my husband died,” she remarked in her harsh, drawling voice. “And even he never did so fifty at a time. Is running about the hills naked in the wintertime a new fad in the town, or could it be that there is a purpose behind this?”

“Not anything anyone’s likely to hear of.”

Lady Wrinshardin turned her head slowly at the sound of Denga Key’s voice, as if she had just noticed the big gladiator. The wrinkled eyelids drooped. “Do I detect a threat in that rather cryptic utterance?” she inquired disinterestedly.

The horse flung up its head with a squeal of fear. From the wet underbrush of the woods, a ring of women materialized behind and around Lady Wrinshardin, some of them a little pale, but all as grim-faced as bandits.

One eyebrow slowly ascended that corrugated forehead. “Goodness,” she murmured to herself. Then, with a quick tweak of the reins, she wheeled the horse and spurred through the line, heading for open country.

“Stop her!” Sheera barked.

Hands grabbed at the bridle, the horse rearing and lashing out at the women who crowded so close around it. Denga Rey caught the bit, dragging its head down while the animal twisted violently to get free. “Enough!” Lady Wrinshardin said sharply, keeping her seat on that pirouetting saddle with the aplomb of a grandmother riding her rocking chair. “You’ve proved your courage; there’s no need to be redundant about it to the point of damaging his mouth.”

The dark woman released her pressure on the bit, but did not step back. Tisa clung grimly to the rein on the other side, her hair in her eyes, looking absurdly young. The haughty noblewoman gazed about at the women hemming her in, and the mocking, amused smile returned to her wrinkled face.

Abruptly she extended her hand to Tisa. “You may help me down, child.”

Startled, the girl held out her clasped hands to make a step. With a single lithe movement. Lady Wrinshardin stepped to the ground and crossed the wet grass to where Sheera stood. She had the haughty and self-centered carriage of a queen.

“Your troops are well trained,” she remarked.

Sheera shook her head. “Only well disciplined.” Alone of the women, she did not appear to be awed by that elegant matriarch. Even Drypettis, whose family—as she hastened to remind anyone who was interested—was among the highest in the city, was cowed. After a moment, Sheera added, “In time, they will be well trained.”

The eyes flickered to Sun Wolf speculatively, then back to Sheera again. “You were wise not to wed my son,” the lady said, putting back the oilskin hood to reveal a tight-coiled braid of white hair pinned close about her head. “He has no more courage than a cur dog that suffers itself to be put out into the rain and fed only the guts of its kills. He is like his father, who also feared Altiokis. Have you met Altiokis?”

Sheera looked startled at the question, as if meeting the Wizard King were tantamount to meeting one’s remoter ancestors, Sun Wolf thought—or meeting the Mother or the Triple God in person.

The lady’s thin lip curled. “He is vulgar.” she pronounced.

“How such a creature could have lived these many years...” Under their creased lids, her eyes flickered, studying Sheera, and her square-cut lips settled into their fanning wrinkles with a look of determination. Sun Wolf was uncomfortably reminded of an old aunt of his who had kept all of his family and most of the tribe in terror for years.

“Come with me to the top of the hill, child,” she said at last. The two women moved off through the wet, winter-faded grass; then Lady Wrinshardin paused and glanced back, as if as an afterthought, at the Wolf. “You come, too.”

He hesitated, then obeyed her—as everyone else must also obey her—following them up the steep slope where granite outcrops thrust through the shallow soil, as if the body of the earth were impatient with that thin and unproductive garment. Greenish-brown hills circled them under the blowing dun rags of the hoary sky.

“My great-grandfather swore allegiance to the Thane of Grimscarp a hundred and fifty years ago,” Lady Wrinshardin said after they had climbed in silence for a few moments, with the tor still rising above their heads, vast as an ocean swell. “Few remember him or the empire that he set out to build, he and his son. In those days, many rulers had court wizards. The greater kings, the lords of the Middle Kingdoms in the southwest, could afford the best. But those who served the Thanes were either the young, unfledged ones, out to make their reputations, or the ones who hadn’t the ability to be or do anything more. They were all of a piece, pretty much—my great-grandfather had one, the Thanes of Schlaeg had one...and the Thanes of Grimscarp, the most powerful of the Tchard Mountain Thanes, had one.

“His name was Altiokis.

“This much I had from my grandfather, who was a boy when the Thane of Grimscarp started setting up an alliance of all the Thanes of all the great old clans, the ancient warrior clans here, in the Tchard Mountains, and down along the Bight Coast, where they hadn’t been pushed out by a bunch of jumped-up tradesmen and weavers who lived behind city wails and never put their noses out of doors to tell which way the wind was blowing. This was in the days before the nuuwa began to multiply until they roamed the mountains and these hills like foul wolves, the days before those human-dog-things, those abominations they call ugies, had ever been heard of. The old Thane of Grim wanted to get up a coalition of the Thanes and the merchant cities and he was succeeding quite nicely, they say.

“But something happened to him. Grandfather couldn’t remember clearly whether it was sudden or gradual; he said the old Thane’s grip seemed to slip. A week, two weeks, then he was dead. His son, a boy of eighteen, ruled the new coalition, with Altiokis at his side.—None of us was ever quite sure when the boy dropped out of sight.”

The steepness of the hill had slowed their steps, the old woman and the young one leaning into the slope. Glancing back, the Wolf could see the other women moving about down below, their flesh bright against the smoky colors of the ground. Tisa and her aunt, Gilden’s sister, the big, bovine Eo, were holding the horse still and stroking its soft nose; Drypettis, as usual, was sitting apart from the others, talking to herself; her eyes were jealously following Sheera.

The freshening wind cracked in Lady Wrinshardin’s cloak like an unfurling sail. The wry old voice went on. “Altiokis’ first conquest was Kilpithie—a fair-sized city on the other side of the mountains; they wove quite good woolen cloth there. He used its inhabitants as slaves to build his new Citadel at the top of the Grim Scarp, where he’d raised that stone hut of his in a single night. They said that he used to go up there to meditate. From there he raised his armies and founded his empire.”

“With the armies of the clans?” Sheera asked quietly.

They had paused for breath, but the climb had warmed her again, and she stood without shivering, the wind that combed the hillcrests tangling her black hair across her face.

“At first,” the lady said grimly. “Once he began to mine gold from the Scarp and from the mountains all about it, he could afford to hire mercenaries. They always said there was another evil that marched in his armies, too—but maybe it was only the sort of men he hired. He pollutes all he touches. Strange beasts multiply in his realm. You know ugies? Ape-things—the Tchard Mountains are stiff with them, though they were never seen before. Nuuwa—”

“Altiokis surely didn’t invent nuuwa,” Sun Wolf put in. He shook his wet hair back, freeing it of the chain around his neck; he was aware of the old lady’s sharp eyes gauging him, judging the relationship between the chain and Sheera against the sureness and command in his voice. He went on. “You get nuuwa turning up in records of one place or another for as far back as the records go. They’re mentioned in some of the oldest songs of my tribe, ten, twelve, fifteen generations ago. Every now and again, you’ll just get them, blundering around the wilderness, killing and eating anything they see.”

The fine-chiseled nostrils flared a little, as if Lady Wrinshardin were unwilling to concede any evil for which Altiokis were not responsible. “They say that nuuwa march in his armies.”

“I’ve heard that,” the Wolf said. “But if you know anything about nuuwa, you’d know it’s impossible. For one thing, there just aren’t that many of them. They—they simply appear, but their appearances are few and far between.”

“Not so few these days,” she said stubbornly. She pulled her oilskin cloak more tightly about her narrow shoulders and continued up the hill,

“And anyway,” the Wolf argued as he and Sheera fell into step with her once more, “they’re too stupid to march anywhere. Hell, all they are is walking mouths...”

“But it cannot be denied,” the lady continued, “that Altiokis spreads evil to what he touches. The Thanes served him once out of regard for their vows to the Thane of Grim. Now they do so from fear of him and his armies.”

They stopped at the crest of the hill, while the winds stormed over and around them like the sea between narrow rocks. Below them on the other side, the Thanelands rolled on, silent and haunting in their winter drabness, possessed of a weird spare beauty of their own. The dead heather and grass of the hills of slate-gray granite gleamed silver with wetness. Twisted trees clung to the skyline like bent crones and shook flailing fists at the heavens.

Far off, in a cuplike depression between three hills, a single, half-ruined tower pointed like a broken bone end toward the windy void above.

“What you’re doing is foolish, you know,” the lady said.

Sheera’s nostrils flared, but she said nothing. Quite a tribute, the Wolf thought, to the old broad’s strength of character, if she can keep Sheera quiet.

“I suppose there’s some scheme afoot in the city to free Tarrin and the menfolk and retake Mandrigyn. As if, having beaten them once, Altiokis could not do so again.”

“He beat them because they were divided by factions,” Sheera said quietly. “I know. My husband was the first man in Derroug Dru’s party and had more to do than most with Altiokis’ victory. Many of the men who supported Altiokis cause—the poorer ones, whose favor he did not need to buy—were sent to the mines as well. And my girls, the whores who go up to the mines, tell me that there is another army of miners, from all corners of Altiokis’ realm, who would fight for the man who freed them.”

“Your sweetheart Tarrin.”

Color blazed into Sheera’s face, her red lips opening to retort.

“Oh, yes, my girl, we’ve heard all about your Golden Prince, for all that his family were parvenus who made their money off a salt monopoly and from draining the swamps to build East Shore. Better blood than your precious husband’s, anyway.” She sniffed.

“My husband—” Sheera began hotly.

Lady Wrinshardin cut her off. “You really think this pack of white-limbed schoolgirls can be taught to overcome Altiokis’ mercenaries?”

Sheera’s lips tightened, but she said nothing.

The lady glanced down into the vale behind them, as haughty as if she reviewed her own troops. Her hands, in their crimson and gold gloves, stroked the oilskin of her cloak.

“I’ll tell you this, then, if you succeed in what you aim, don’t return to the city. The tunnels of the mine connect with the Citadel itself. Cut off the serpent’s head—don’t go back to hide behind her walls and wait for it to get you.”

Eyes widening with alarm, Sheera whispered, “That’s impossible. Those ways are guarded by magic. Altiokis himself is deathless...”

“He wasn’t birthless,” Lady Wrinshardin snapped. “He was born a man and, like a man, he can be killed. Attack the Citadel, and you’ll have the Thanes on your side—myself, Drathweard of Schlaeg, and all the little fry as well. Wait for him to put the city under siege again, and he’ll fall on you with everything he’s got.”

She jerked her chin toward the rolling valleys and distant tower. “That’s the old Cairn Tower. The Thanes of Cairn ran afoul of the fifteenth Thane of Wrinshardin, God rest what passed in them for souls. The place hasn’t been inhabited since. It is a good run,” she added with a malicious glitter in her eyes, “from here.”

And turning, she moved back down the hill, straight and arrogant as a queen of these wild lands. Sheera and Sun Wolf marked the location of the tower with their eyes and followed her down.

While she was mounting her horse beside the mere again, the lady said, as if as an afterthought, “They used to say that weapons were stored there. I doubt you’ll find any of the old caches, but you are welcome to whatever you come across.”

She settled herself in the saddle and collected the reins with a spare economy of movement that spoke of a life lived in the saddle. “Come out of that web-footed marsh to visit me, if you will,” she added. “We need to further our acquaintance.”

So saying, she wheeled her horse and, ignoring the other women as if they had not existed, rode through them and away over the moors.

After that they met mornings and evenings, rotating the groups—by daylight in the ruins of the old Cairn Tower, by lamplight in the boarded-up orangery. Sun Wolf announced that running to and from the peasant hut where they frequently hid their cloaks would provide the conditioning necessary for wind and muscles, and thereafter seldom took the women on a general run. Within a week he could tell which ones ran to and from the tower and which walked.

The ones who walked—there were not many—were cut.

And all the while, he could feel them coming together as a force under his hand. He was beginning to know them and to understand the changes he saw in them, not only in their bodies but in their minds as well. With their veils and chaperons, they had—timidly at first, then more boldly—discarded the instinctive notion that they were incapable of wielding weapons, even in their own defense. Since his conversation with Amber Eyes, Sun Wolf had often wondered what went on in the minds of those pliant, quiet ones, the ones who had been raised to tell men only what they wanted to hear. These women looked him in the face when they spoke to him now, even the shyest. He wondered whether that was the effect of weapons training or whether it was because, when they weren’t learning how to fight, they were running the financial life of the city.

He had to admit to himself that, after a discouraging start, they were turning out to be a fairly good batch of warriors.

The weapons they found cached in the Cairn Tower were old, and their make cruder and heavier than was general among the expert metalworkers of Mandrigyn. Gilden’s sister Eo and young Tisa set up a forge at the tower to lighten them as much as they could without losing the weight necessary to parry and deliver killing strokes. Denga Rey, watching the practice at the tower one day, suggested that the half-pints of the troop use halberds instead.

“A five-foot halberd can be used in battle like a sword,” she said, watching Wilarne laboring to wield her weapon against a leggy black courtesan named Cobra. The roofless hall of the old fortress made a smooth-floored, oval arena some forty feet in length, and the women were scattered across it, wrestling, fighting with weapons, practicing the deadlier throws and breaks of sneak attacks. For once it was not raining, and, except in the low places, the floor was dry. The Wolf had worked them here on days when mud coated them so thickly that it was only by size and the way they moved that they could be distinguished.

From where he and the gladiator stood on what must have been the old feasting dais, they could look out across the sunken floor of the room to the steps and the empty triple arch of the doorway and to the moors beyond. There must have been a courtyard of some kind there once—now there was only a flattened depression in the ground and little heaps of stones covered with lichens and weeds. And below him, between him and the door, the women were busy.

He wondered what the Hawk would make of them.

Denga Rey continued. “Most of the little ones are using swords that are as light as possible for effective weapons—and they are still having troubles. In a pitched fight, a man could outreach them.”

Sun Wolf nodded. With luck, they would surprise the guards at the mines and free and arm the men from the guards’ armories without the need for a pitched battle. But long experience had taught him never to rely on luck.

The only problem with having the smaller women use halberds in battle came from Drypettis, who took it as a personal affront that the Wolf would make allowances, for her size, in a tight voice, she told him, “We can succeed on your own terms. Captain. There is no need to condescend.”

He glanced down at her, startled. At times she sounded like an absurd echo of Sheera, without Sheera’s shrewdness or her sense of purpose. Patiently, he said, “There’s only one set of terms to measure success in war, Drypettis.”

That tight little fold at the corners of her mouth deepened.

“So you have told us—repeatedly,” she retorted with distaste. “And in the crudest possible fashion.”

Behind her, Gilden and Wilarne exchanged a glance; the other small women—Sister Quincis and red-haired Tamis Weaver—looked uneasy.

“Have I?” the Wolf rumbled quietly. “I don’t think so.

“Success in war,” he went on, “is measured by whether or not you do what you aim to—not by whether you yourself live or die. The success of a war is not measured in the same terms as the success of a fight. Succeeding in a war is getting what you want, whether you yourself live or die. Now, it’s sometimes nicer to be alive afterward and enjoy what you’ve fought for—provided what you’ve fought for is enjoyable. But if you want it badly enough—want others to have it—even that isn’t necessary. And it sure as hell doesn’t matter how nobly or how crudely you pursue your goal, or who makes allowances or who condescends to you in the process. If you know what you want, and you want it badly enough to do whatever you have to, then do it. If you don’t—forget it.”

The silence in that single corner of the half-ruined tower was palpable, the shrill grunts and barked commands in the hall beyond them seeming to grow as faint and distant as the keening of the wind across the moors beyond the walls. It was the first time that he had spoken of war to them, and he felt all the eyes of this small group of tiny women on him.

“It’s the halfway that eats you,” he said softly. “The trying to do what you’re not certain that you want to do; the wanting to do what you haven’t the go-to-hell courage—or selfishness—to carry through. If what you think you want can only be got with injustice and getting your hands dirty and trampling over friends and strangers—then understand what it will do to others, what it will do to you, and either fish or cut bait. If what you think you want can only be got with your own death or your own lifelong utter misery—understand that, too.

“I fight for money. If I don’t win, I don’t get paid. That makes everything real clear for me. You—you’re fighting for other things. Maybe for an idea. Maybe for what you think you ought to believe in, because people you consider better than you believe in it, or say they do. Maybe to save someone who fed and clothed and loved you, the father of your children—maybe out of love and maybe out of gratitude. Maybe you’re fighting because somebody else’s will had drawn you into this, and you’d rather die yourself than tell her you have other goals than hers. I don’t know that. But I think you’d better know it—and know it real clearly, before any of you faces an armed enemy.”

They were silent around him, these half-pints, these small and delicate women. Wilarne’s eyes fell in confusion, and he saw rose flush up under her wind-bitten cheeks.

But it was Drypettis who spoke. “Honor demands—”

“To hell with honor,” the Wolf said shortly, understanding that she had not heard one word he had said. “Women don’t have honor.”

She went white with anger. “Maybe the women you habitually consort with do not—”

“Captain!” Denga Rey’s voice cut across the scuffling, sharp and uneasy. “Someone coming!”

Every sense suddenly snapped alert. He said briefly, “Hide.” All around them, at the sound of the gladiator’s words, the women had been fading from sight, seeking the darkness of the arches that had once supported a gallery around the hall, now a ruin of scrub and shadow; they were concealing themselves in the hundred bolt holes afforded by ruined passages and half-collapsed turrets whose stones were feathered with dry moss and fern. Gilden and Wilarne clambered up inside the monstrous flue of the hall’s old chimney as if trained from childhood as climbing boys.

Only Drypettis stood where she was, rigid with anger. “You can’t...” she began, almost stifling with rage.

Sun Wolf seized her arm impatiently and half threw her toward a droop-eyed hollow of a broken doorway. “Hide, rot your eyes!” he roared at her and ran to where only Sheera and Denga Rey stood, visible on either side of the triple arch of the raised door.

From here, the valley in which the Cairn Tower was situated could be seen in one sweep of trampled brown grass and standing water. Desolately empty, it lay hemmed in by the stone-crested hills and the gray weight of cloud cover, a solitude unbroken save by a few barren and wind-crippled trees. Then, in that solitude, something moved, a figure running toward the tower.

“It’s Tisa,” Sheera said, surprise and fear in her voice. “She was on watch at Ghnir Crag, keeping an eye on the direction of town.”

Denga Rey said, “There’s something else moving down there, too. Look, in the brush along the side of the crag.”

The girl plunged, stumbling, up the ruined steps and into Sun Wolf’s arms. She was panting, unable to catch her breath—not the measured wind of a racer, but the panic gasps of one who had fled for her life.

“What is it?” Sun Wolf asked, and she raised her face to stare into his with widened ayes.

“Nuuwa,” she choked. “Coming here—lots of them, Captain.”

“More than twenty?”

She nodded; her flesh was trembling under his hands at what she had so narrowly escaped. “I couldn’t count, but I think there were more than twenty. Coming from all sides...”

“Pox rot the filthy things. Turn out!” he bellowed, his voice like thunder in the weed-grown walls. “We’re under attack! Nuuwa—lots of ’em!”

The shadows blossomed women. Just under half the strength of the troop was there that day, eighteen women counting Sheera.

“Twenty nuuwa!” Denga Rey was saying. “What the hell are that many nuuwa doing in the Thaneland? That’s ridiculous! You never see more than a few at a time, and never...”

But as she was cursing she was gathering up her weapons. Women were running all around, leaping up the crazy walls under Sheera’s shouted commands. Some of them had bows and arrows; others had the heavy, old-fashioned swords. All of them had daggers.

But if you are dose enough to use a dagger on a nuuwa, Sun Wolf thought, it is far too late.

He could see them now, moving out in the hills. Slumped bodies were creeping along the road, or emerging from the brushy slopes between the hills with a deceptively quick, shambling lope. He felt his hair prickle at the numbers of them. By the First Ancestor of the World, how many were there?

“Somebody make a fire,” he ordered, and went scrambling up the slumped remains of a gallery stair to the broken platform above the door. The view from the top turned him sick with dread.

The nuuwa had broken cover from the hills all around and were converging on the tower. Eyeless heads wagged loosely on lolling necks; shoulders were bent so that the creatures’ big, claw-nailed hands flopped, twitching, around their knees. The hollows of those eaten-out eye sockets swayed back and forth, as if they still sighted through the scarred-over, fallen flesh. If it were not for the way the nuuwa moved—dead straight, with no consideration for the rise and fall of the ground—they might almost have been mistaken for true men.

Sun Wolf counted almost forty.

From here, he could look down upon all of the Cairn Tower. What remained of the curtain wall that had once surrounded the place lay in a sloppy ring around the oval tower itself. Wall and tower were not concentric—the tower stood at one end, so that its triple-arched doorway, empty of any defensive barrier, looked straight out into the valley. Below him, he could see the women fanning out along the broken top of the curtain wall, the bare flesh of their shoulders and the colors of their hair very bright against the winter drabness of lichenous stone and yellowed weeds and heather. No need to conceal themselves, for nuuwa did not track their prey by sight. No need for strategy, for the nuuwa understood none.

All they understood—all they sought—was flesh.

From the wall, he heard the whining thwunk of bowstrings and saw two of the advancing creatures stumble. One of them lumbered to its feet again and came on, the arrow sticking through its neck like a hatpin through a doll; the other staggered a few steps, spouting blood from a punctured jugular, then fell, its grotesquely grown teeth snapping in horrible chewing motions as it tried to wallow its way along. Another of the creatures tripped over it in its advance, then got up and shambled on. Nuuwa—in common with all other predators—would not touch the flesh of nuuwa. The ground was prickled with arrows. Most of the women had terrible aim.

Smoke stung his eyes. Below him in the court, he could see that Gilden had got a fire going—Tisa was gathering up branches, sticks, anything that could be used as torches. Sheera and Denga Rey both had fire in their hands as they stood in the open arches of the door. Nuuwa had just enough instinct to fear the heat of fire. From his vantage point, the Wolf could see that in some fashion they knew that there was no wall at the doorway. Half a dozen were shambling toward the two women who stood in that gap.

He came down from the platform at a run.

Wet mud and pits of last week’s thin snowfall scummed the crazy steps. The entire curtain wall must have the same vile footing, he thought. Then he heard it, beyond the higher ruins of the tower. From along the wall, now out of his sight, came the slithering crash of dislodged stone and falling bodies, the hooting grunts of the nuuwa, and the soft, smacking thunk of steel biting naked flesh.

He had a torch in one hand and a sword in the other as he sprang up the steps to the empty gateway instants before the nuuwa came lolloping, gape-mouthed, to meet the women. Sheera made the mistake of slashing at the widest target—the breast—and the creature she cut fell on her with a vast, streaming wound yawning in its chest, eyeless face contorted, mouth reaching to bite. The Wolf had decapitated the first creature within range; he spun in the next split second and hacked off both huge hands that gripped Sheera’s arm, allowing her to spring back out of range and slash downward on the thing’s neck. It was all he had time for—nuuwa were pressing up toward them, heedless of the cut of the steel; spouting blood drenched them, hot on the flesh and running down slippery underfoot. Beside him, he was vaguely aware of Denga Rey, fighting with the businesslike brutality of a professional with sword and torch.

He felt something gash and tear at his ankle, then saw that a fallen nuuwa had sunk its teeth into his calf. He slashed downward, severing the head as it tore at his flesh. Clawed hands seized his sword arm, and he cut at the eyeless face with his torch, setting the matted hair and filthy, falling beard aflame. The creature released him and began shrieking in a rattling, hoarse gasp, blundering against its fellows and pawing at the blaze. Denga Rey, freed for an instant, kicked it viciously back, and it went rolling down the steps, face flaming, howling in death agonies as others stumbled over it to close in on the defenders.

Through the confusion of that hideous fight and the searing agony of the head still clinging doggedly to his calf, Sun Wolf could hear the distant chaos of cries, hoarse grunts, and shrill shouts. He heard a scream, keening and horrible, rising to a fever pitch of rending pain and terror, and knew that one of the women had been overcome and was being killed. But like so many things in the heat of battle, he noted it without much interest, detached, grimly fighting to avoid a like fate himself. Another scream sounded closer, together with a slithering crash of bodies falling from the wall. From the comer of .his eye, he saw locked forms writhing on the icy clay of the hall floor, a tangle of threshing limbs and fountaining blood. Eo the blacksmith sprang forward with one of those huge two-handed broadswords upraised as if it were as light as a willow switch.

He saw no more; filthy hands and snapping, slobbering mouths pressed close around him. For a moment, he felt as if he were being engulfed in that horrible mob, driven back into the shadow of the empty gateway and wondering where the drop of the steps was.

Then steel zinged near him; as he decapitated one of the things grabbing and biting at him, Denga Rey’s sword sliced the spine of another, and it fell, rolling and spasming, at his feet. Those were the last of the immediate attackers. He swung around and saw that the steps were piled knee-deep in twitching bodies, from which a thick current of brilliant red ran down to pool among the rocks. Behind him, the tower was silent, save for a single voice raised in a despairing wail of grief.

The nuuwa were all dead.

He looked down to where the severed head still locked on his calf with a death grip. Fighting a surge of nausea, he bent down and beat at the joint of the jawbone with the weighted pommel of his sword until the jaw broke and he was able to pull the thing off by its verminous hair. Hands shaking, he knelt on the slimy steps and held out his hand for Denga Rey’s torch, since his own had been lost in the fight. Reversing it, he drove the flaming end into the wound. Smoke and the stink of burning meat assailed his nostrils; the pain went through his body like a stroke of lightning. Distantly, he was aware of the sound of Sheera’s being sick in a corner of the hall.

He flung the torch away and collapsed on his hands and knees, fighting nausea and darkness. It wasn’t the first time he had had to do this, from nuuwa or from other wounds, but it never got any easier.

Footsteps pattered on the clay floor. He heard the murmur of voices and opened his eyes to see Amber Eyes binding up Denga Rey’s bloody arm with someone’s torn, gold-embroidered scarf.

Both women hastened to his side, and Amber Eyes knelt to bandage his wounds. Her hands were sticky with gore. When he had breath to speak, Sun Wolf asked them, “You bitten anywhere?”

“Few slashes,” the gladiator said shortly.

“Burn ’em.”

“They’re not deep.”

“I said bum ’em. We aren’t talking about sword cuts in the arena; nuuwa are filthier than mad dogs. I’ll do it for you if you’re afraid.”

That got her. She damned his eyes, without malice, knowing he was right. Under her swarthy tan, even she looked pate and sick.

After a quick, brutal cauterization, he helped her to her feet, both of them leaning a little on Amber Eyes for support. They were joined in a moment by a very pallid Sheera, her hair in wet black strings before her eyes. Like theirs, her limbs were plastered in gore. Sun Wolf shook himself clear of Denga Rey and limped to put a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“You all right?”

She was quivering all over, like a bowstring after its arrow was spent. He sensed that it was touch and go whether she would fall on his shoulder in hysterics; but after a moment she drew a deep breath and said huskily. “I’ll be all right.”

“Good girl.” He slapped her comfortingly on the buttock and was rewarded with the kind of glare generally reserved for the humbler sort of insects in their last moments before a servant was called to swat them. He grinned to himself. She’d obviously got over the first shock,

There were no other women in the empty hall. Slowly, limping with the pain of their wounds, the four of them staggered to the narrow postern that let them into the ruined circle of the curtain wall. Like the steps, the ground there was littered with the bodies of dead nuuwa with severed heads and hands and feet. Dark blood dripped down the stones and soaked into the winter-hard ground. At the far end of the court, the women stood in a silent group, staring in nauseated fascination at a tall, rawboned woman named Kraken, who was kneeling, her face buried in her hands, over the dismembered and half-eaten body of sharp, little, red-haired Tamis Weaver. Kraken was rocking back and forth and wailing, a desolate moaning sound, like a hurt animal.

After a moment Gilden and Wilarne moved in, bitten and painted with the blood of their dead enemies, and gently helped Kraken to her feet and led her away. She moved like a blind woman, half doubled over with grief.

Sun Wolf looked around at those who were left. He saw women with scared faces, gray with shock and nausea, the ends of their tangled hair pointy with blood. Some of them had been bitten, clawed, chewed—there’d be more work, burning the wounds, the agonizing aftermath of war. The place stank with that peculiar battleground smell, the vile reek of blood and vomit and excrement, of death and terror. Some of them, like Erntwyff Fish, looked angry still; others, like Sister Quincis and Eo, seemed burned out, as if only cold ash remained of the fire that had carried them alive through battle. Others looked merely puzzled, staring about in confusion, as if they had no idea how they had come to be wounded, exhausted, cold, and sick in this slaughterhouse place. More than one was crying, with shock and grief and relief.

But none of them looked, or would ever again look, quite as they had. .

The Wolf sighed. “Well, ladies,” he said quietly, “now you’ve seen battle.”