Citadels of Darkover

by Deborah J. Ross

  “...to find a comfortable position?” Martina snorted. She was a big woman with a sometimes crude sense of humor, good at outdoor work and missions for the Guildhouse. This time, mentoring Gali on her first trip out as a courier had been added to her tasks. “Why do you always apologize? We are lying on a stone floor in an abandoned fortress, besieged by reivers who will rape us if they can. There are no comfortable positions here.”

  “I’m sorry...” Gali began, then shut her lips on the words, realizing that she was doing it again. The truth is, I am sorry to be alive, she thought then. When she saw I was going to look like one of the Terranan, my mother should have left me at the Spacemen’s Orphanage.

  “I can’t sleep, either,” Martina whispered. “And after hours of listening to men arguing I thought I would drop right off, since all their chest-pounding only served to confirm what we already knew.”

  Gali nodded. “There is still water in the well. We have a few days’ food for humans, or longer if we start killing the pack-beasts, and since we are nearly out of fodder, we may have to do that, anyway.”

  “But to carry the goods away the bandits need those animals alive,” Martina replied. “So Wrong-Hand has to attack.”

  Gali sighed. “I saw at least two dozen outlaws out there. Captain MacAran only has ten guards, and I would be surprised if as many as four of the merchants know how to use their swords...”

  “Four, plus us—” the other woman replied.

  Gali shook her head. “Do you really think our long knives will be much use against bandit blades?”

  “Do you always have to look at the gloomy side of things?”

  I’ve never seen much reason to do anything else, Gali thought bitterly. Her mother had called her Margali after a Terran woman who was one of the legends of the Thendara Guildhouse, but she had never dared claim more than a part of that name. Darkover’s relationship to the Terran Empire had varied over the years, but since the Yellow Plague, prejudice against the Terranan had been running high. Despite her full-Terran birth, Margali n’ha Ysabet had been able to pass as Darkovan in a way that Gali n’ha Simone, though she had been brought up in the Guildhouse, would never be able to do.

  When I took the Renunciate’s oath I thought I could win a place for myself. Even if we get out of here, I will never belong.

  “The world goes as it will, not as you or I would have it,” Martina said finally. “Look at it this way—if they kill us, at least we will not starve. And laughing or weeping we need sleep, so get some rest if you can.” She patted Gali’s shoulder, then pulled up her blankets and turned over.

  For a time Gali lay listening to the snores coming from the men bedded down in the other part of the room, but eventually sleep took her as well.

  In the deep hours of the night, she dreamed.

  Someone was calling her.

  She wandered through what seemed endless passages. At first they were as dusty as the room in which she lay, but as she went on, the floor grew smoother, and sometimes when she reached out she felt the textured weave of tapestry instead of rough stone.

  But these were only minor distractions. As Gali moved on, ever more clearly she could hear the call. “Help me...”

  ~o0o~

  Morning brought a fight between two of the guards. Gali snapped awake when she heard the shouts, thinking the outlaws were attacking, and was not sure whether to be angry or relieved when she heard Captain MacAran swearing at his men. He was a big, black-bearded man whose voice showed that even his usually even temper could be strained. She should not have been surprised that one of the combatants was Karlo, a cocky fellow with curly dark hair and a young man’s first wispy beard. Like Gali he was on his first trip with a caravan. He had already tried to grab her, only desisting when Martina set hand to the hilt of her sword, and picked a quarrel with Tomas Kinnair, a nervous little man who was hoping to trade Terran cloth for Dry Towner spices in Serrais.

  As the merchants set a cauldron boiling to cook breakfast there were more hard words. Apparently no one had slept well. Even Martina’s sense of humor seemed muted today. Gali’s head ached. Wrong-Hand had warned them, she remembered, cradling the mug of tea between her palms. What did he know?

  She was just finishing her porridge when a shout from the gate was echoed by the harsh blat of a horn. The men had spent the previous evening fortifying the entrance with wagons braced by boards and fallen stones. Porridge bowls went rolling as people reached for their weapons. On the other side of the make-shift barrier they could see Ranald and his henchman, who were mounted, and the points of a dozen spears.

  “Well, now,” said the leader, eyeing the barricade. “This be a poor sort of welcome!”

  “’Tis no welcome at all!” Mestre Andres said boldly. “What we have, we will hold!”

  For a moment the outlaw stared at him. Then he grinned. “I think not, but my men are bored. Maybe they give you some exercise.” The hoof beats faded as he galloped back up the hill.

  Captain MacAran was already shouting orders. The leather-armored guards, spears ready, spread out and those merchants who were armed fell in behind them.

  “You two!” the captain’s gaze lit on the Amazons. “You look like you can climb. Get yourselves up in the tower and yell if they try one of the walls.”

  Gali eyed the structure behind her. The tower loomed above the old barracks, three stories tall, part of its top blasted by wind or wizardry. Beyond it lay more ruins. She noticed that men passing that way instinctively avoided them. Suddenly the tower seemed a refuge, and she hurried to follow Martina inside. The ground floor was partially blocked by old boards and other trash, but the plank ceiling and the ladder seemed to be in relatively good repair.

  On the second level half the wall was gone, but the ladder remained. When Gali emerged from below, Martina was already leaning over the parapet that still rimmed part of the top, the cropped strands of her graying hair lifting in the breeze.

  “Not very secure, is it, but at least we have a good view!”

  Gali’s head cleared as she drew in deep breaths of the fresh air. Except at the front, the ground fell away sharply on every side.

  “They’ll have to attack the gate. I don’t see how anyone could scale those walls. What will we do if they succeed?”

  Martina pointed at the ladder. “Hit each man over the head as he appears? And leap to our deaths if they get past—”

  A shout focused their attention below. Wrong-Hand was marshalling his men. The horn blatted and they rushed forward, but the spearmen were ready, jabbing through openings in the barrier as the enemy surged against it, their boiled-leather caps and back-and-breast plates repelling the arrows that were falling from the sky. Watching from the top of the tower, Gali could almost fancy she was looking at one of the puppet shows they put on at festivals, where tiny figures jerked and bounced before a painted screen.

  And then the reiver horn blared once more. The men of the caravan cheered as the attackers began to back away.

  ~o0o~

  “We didn’t drive them off,” said Captain MacAran, setting down his emptied cup. “They withdrew.” Dinner was finished, and conversation had returned to the events of the day. Gali spooned up the last of her soup, wishing the dull ache in her head had not started again. Martina had gotten out her kit to mend a seam in her belt-pouch, but she sat with eyes closed, needle and waxed thread beside her. She had always seemed so confident, but now Gali could see dark circles beneath her eyes.

  This isn’t right, she frowned. Or am I being a child, expecting everyone else to be perfect so they can take care of me?

  “Do you mean they’ll be back again?” asked Mestre Andres. Some of the guards began to laugh.

  “Sure as the sun rises,” the captain replied. “Though they may not wait for the sun. I do not think they will press a real attack during the night, but we must turn out for every alarm.”

  “And who do you think will tire first?” muttered the spice merchant. “Th
ey only need a few men to wake us while the others slumber.”

  “Spawn of kyorebni,” hissed one of the other men. “Did you see how their leader laid out poor Kendry?” He nodded toward the man who lay on piled cloaks by the fireplace. A single blow from the outlaw chieftain had smashed his shoulder.

  “Wrong-Hand indeed!” exclaimed Kyril, who had contributed some of his silk to bind the wound. “Does that gauntlet even come off?”

  “In the Merchant’s Guild they say his hand was warped by magic,” said Mestre Andres, “some device from the ancient days that he found in a ruin. When he tried to use it, the thing melted his bones.”

  At those words it seemed to Gali that a shiver passed through them all. Conversations faltered. Everyone sought their blankets, and soon she heard only an occasional moan from the man who lay by the fire.

  This time, sleep came quickly, but in the depths of the night, Gali dreamed again.

  Once more she moved through a maze of passages. Was she remembering the ruins she had seen from the top of the towers? These corridors seemed carved from the bedrock of the hill.

  Once more she heard the murmurs. When they ceased, she found herself in a chamber whose pillars were hewn from living stone. On a table light glowed from a box about a foot long and a little less than that high, carved of some pale, translucent stone.

  Gali moved toward it—

  —and jerked awake, shaking, to the sound of shouting and the clash of arms.

  It was morning, and the outlaws were attacking once more.

  ~o0o~

  The same pattern continued for the next five days. The bandits would attack at dawn, and sometimes again in the afternoon. But despite their threats, they never appeared until the sun was in the sky.

  As food supplies lessened, tempers were growing shorter as well. Not surprising, perhaps, when they were all cooped up together and under constant strain. She had hoped their shared danger would bring them together. Surely everyone understood that solidarity was their only defense, but quarrels broke out, when people talked to each other at all, and only Captain MacAran’s authority kept blows from leading to blades.

  On the fifth day, the man who had been punched by Wrong-Hand died.

  “That blow should not have killed him,” said Martina, settling down with her back against the parapet that edged the intact part of the tower. The day had dawned cloudy. If it stormed, the tower would become an uncomfortable refuge.

  “It must have been the spikes,” Gali replied. “You saw the punctures. The gods only know what filth was on that glove.” The spider-silk merchant was the closest they had to a healer, and she had helped him to treat the man. First the holes had grown red and puffy, then dark streaks began to spread beneath the skin.

  “Dirty wounds can go bad that way,” said Martina. Gali nodded, but she could not help wondering if some evil magic in the gauntlet itself had poisoned the wounds.

  For a time they sat in silence, listening to the wind.

  “Gods, how I want to get out of here!” Martina exclaimed.

  “If you could go anywhere, where would you choose?”

  The older woman laughed. “There is a lovely inn at Neskaya. I stayed there after I escorted a girl from Thendara to start training at the Tower. She was from a family of leather-workers, but there must have been Comyn blood in her line somewhere. She had hair like new copper, and she could snap her fingers and spark a candle flame.”

  Gali nodded. For a child on Darkover the idea that some unsuspected heritage might give her such powers was a common fantasy.

  “And you would like to see her again?” she asked. Martina had no lover in the Guildhouse, and Gali had never thought to wonder what her romantic history might be.

  “Not her—” Martina laughed. “Such a little bit of a thing she was, I’d have been afraid I’d break her. No, I’m remembering one of the maids at the inn. We had a few lusty nights together, and I dreamed for years of going back, asking her to help me set up a place of our own. She’s probably married with six children by now.”

  They had their very own tower here, thought Gali, but if it held any magic it was very different from what the matrix mechanics taught in the Towers. And it was the blood of Terra, not that of the Comyn, that flowed in her veins.

  “And what about you?” the other woman said then.

  “I might go off-planet...” Gali’s father had been a hydroponics engineer, rotated away soon after she was born. But he had registered her as his child. If she chose to claim Terran citizenship, she could seek a new life on another world.

  “To Terra?” Martina’s eyes widened, then focused, as if really seeing her companion for the first time, and she gave a little laugh. “Of course, I keep forgetting that you have the right to choose.”

  Now it was Gali’s turn to stare. Did the other woman really see her as just another Guild-sister? Did they all?

  “It’s just a thought I have sometimes,” she said abruptly and got to her feet.

  The view had not changed much, except that more color was leached from the landscape by the lowering clouds. Beyond the gorge that backed the fortress rocky cliffs were crowned with resin-trees. In the other direction, hill and pasture sloped toward the valley where the Carthon River rolled.

  A few curses drifted up from below. Old Rafael, the drover, was organizing men to tend the pack-beasts penned against the far wall. Captain MacAran’s black horse threw up its head and snorted as it scented the water, echoed by the bleating of the chervines.

  As the water-bearers swung wide around the ruins, she looked at them more closely, trying to make some sense of the jumble of room and passageway. One large space might have been a common room, but what about that collection of squares, and the darker rectangle nearby? She leaned over, peering down.

  There was something about that space... Her gaze seemed to sink into the shadow, as if it were calling her.

  She started as Martina’s hand closed on her arm.

  “Don’t you fall over the side!” The other woman gave her a shake. “We just buried one man. I don’t want to have to bury you as well.”

  Gali shook her head, surprised to find she felt only gratitude that her companion cared. What I saw doesn’t matter, she told herself, but as she sat down again, her deeper mind replied, There’s something important down there.

  A drop of moisture splashed her hand. It was beginning to rain.

  ~o0o~

  When she felt the touch, Gali thought she had backed into one of the tables. Another day was ending, and the people of the caravan had gathered for a meager evening meal. Then the pressure became a pinch. She whirled, astonishment exploding into fury as Karlo snatched his hand back and grinned.

  “Nice butt in those Free Amazon breeches—” he began, but her blade was out. It might not be a proper sword, but at such close quarters it was long enough to score a white scratch across his leather vest as he leaped out of the way, lust turning to alarm.

  “Hey now—” one of the other men stepped between them. “That’s no way to behave!”

  “She drew on me!” Karlo pointed, seeking support from the men who were turning to see what the commotion was. “The bitch drew steel!”

  “You groped me!” Gali gasped.

  “A friendly pat—” said one man. “Wear a skirt if you don’t want men to appreciate your ass!”

  Now all the men were babbling. Gali set her back against the table, bared sword still gripped in her hand. Eyes flashing, Martina joined her.

  “She should take it as a compliment—” said someone.

  “Sooty-dark as one o’ the forge-folk she is! Who would want her if there was anything better to hand?” another man chimed in.

  Gali felt a flush further darken her skin. Sometimes children had pointed at her in Thendara, but the city saw enough strangers that she did not attract too much attention there.

  “You leave her be!” snapped Martina. Her hand was on her hilt, though she had not drawn her blade. A dee
p grumble came from the men who faced them, and Gali’s anger was replaced by a chill of fear.

  “What’s all this?” Men turned as Captain MacAran elbowed his way through the crowd.

  “That lout assaulted my companion,” Martina said stiffly.

  The captain turned to Karlo. “I don’t see any blood—”

  “But she—” the young man started to protest.

  “Those bitches all alike, makin’ trouble,” came a mutter from behind him. “Should never have let ’em out on their own.”

  “Boys with no manners should go back to their mothers,” said Kyril.

  “An’ men that don’t know you need to keep the bitches in line should stay home,” someone replied.

  At MacAran’s glare, the men began to back away, but tension still throbbed in the room.

  “All right—” The captain turned back to the women. “You two take first watch. Give these fools time to simmer down. And you, bully-boy, will take mid-watch, so sleep while you can!”

  ~o0o~

  The rain had ceased, but a restless wind moaned among the stones, whipping the clouds across the sky. It was the kind of weather that encouraged strange imaginings. At the beginning of the siege, old Rafael had entertained them with bits of local lore picked up on his many journeys through this land. During the Ages of Chaos, the Kilghards had been a constant battle ground. The hills were studded with ruins, and the hunters and herders who roamed here were happy to share their tales of less tangible survivals from the ancient days. One of the most disturbing was the tale of the White Lady of the Fells whose mere glance brought death. Requests for stories had ceased after Kendry died, but when Gali saw someone start at a shadow, she knew that people were remembering.

  Wrapped in their cloaks, the two women settled where they could see the gate beyond the broken side of the tower. On the hillside behind it the bandits’ fire made a golden glow, and from time to time the wind would carry a snatch of raucous song

  “I didn’t do anything to encourage him!” murmured Gali. “He stared at me a lot, but I didn’t talk to him.”