Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

  “You are wearing a lot of weapons,” she replied. “Is it not very heavy?”

  “He has a tendency to break things,” said Skander without looking up.

  Margaret looked from him to Dammerung again.

  The War-wolf touched his trunk smartly with one toe: the lid crashed down and the latch clicked to. “True an’ I hit hard: you could fill an armoury with the blades I have broken. Only Widowmaker has survived me.”

  Margaret surveyed his arms but there was not much to see for the long, loose silk sheaves that were his sleeves. He was not big and muscular like his cousin, but she did not doubt the image of him breaking an axe in two while shearing through buckler and bone.

  Skander’s voice cut aptly through her thoughts. “Dammerung, must I insist?”

  Dammerung only smiled and did not let his gaze waver from her. “Nay, Lady Spitcat is all one for this, isn’t she? Not a blanch on that cheek, coz—look at it!”

  “I am not inclined to look at ladies’ cheeks,” muttered his cousin.

  The grey-blue eyes danced. “After all, what is death?”

  What is death? Last night she had not been afraid, not of death nor really of pain. This morning she was worried about pain and, had it not been for that single stark moment just before bed last night in which she and Dammerung had looked into each other’s eyes and seen the shared horror in them of what was happening in Plenilune, she might still flick death a careless hand. Now it was different. Now it meant something: not for her, not for him, but for what was left behind.

  “It is a damned inconvenience to the rest of us,” she said. The words came so quick out of her mouth they surprised even herself.

  Like a falcon bating, his brows flickered upward. “Yes,” he mused. “I thought so too at the time.”

  Skander opened his mouth as if to speak, seemed to think better of it, and smoothed his own feathers. “I go to rally before the mists lift,” he said, rolling up the map and stepping toward the tent opening. “If you have need of me you’ll find me where the ravens thicken.”

  “I’ll look for you among the spears,” Dammerung said with a click and a flash of one ringed hand in salute. When Skander was gone he turned to Margaret. “You have not eaten. Are you hungry?”

  “No,” she replied truthfully. She could not dream of eating. All her insides, she found, had gone wrong and felt more like cold lumps inside her skin against which her heart pounded with a sickening heat.

  She was grateful that he did not look sympathetic. “You will be,” he told her uncompromisingly. “I give it five minutes before Mark Roy and Lord Gro come up. There are nuts and fruit on the table there: best scarf while you have time and before we have to be on our best behaviour. I’ll join you.”

  They sat in comparative silence and ate the strawberries and blueberries and nuts that Aikaterine had brought up. The bacon was gone, but the heady scent lingered heavily on the air and made Margaret nauseated. She ate gamely and numbly. She would have liked to have asked Dammerung questions about how he thought the day would go forward, but she found that not only did she not know enough about war to ask, she did not want to pester him. He seemed lost in thought, eating mechanically, fetching her on occasion a brief glance, and at another moment twisting suddenly to look out the tent-flap. But he did not seem concerned, and that comforted her.

  It was precisely five minutes, and just when Margaret felt she could not safely swallow another bite, when the entryway darkened and Mark Roy’s short, broad figure cast a watery shadow on the ground. He stepped in and Lord Gro ducked in behind him.

  “You’ve come,” said Dammerung frankly, and gestured to Skander’s vacant chair and a battered stool.

  “We’ve come,” Mark Roy replied lightly. The two men bowed to Margaret and took their seats. “The mists are still lying low,” the king went on. “What do you make of the lie of our foe?”

  Dammerung’s lip curled upward in a playful smile. “I think it a pretty lie, but an old one. Nay, what—the lie? He holds the dalemouth like a boar and backs up the fellsides so that he has height and downward speed for his ally. We have that here, but we must stretch ourselves to meet in the middle.” He turned again and peered outside. There was not much to see: from their height they had a view over the picket-line and the top of the next tent down, and then nothing but a beautiful steel-blue swimming of dawn air and the huge blurred bulk of the next hill over. “You are right about the mists. The war-dogs will have sport today.”

  Margaret shivered.

  Mark Roy said, “Gro wants especially to pair with Lifoy. There is some matter between them, it seems, that needs finishing.”

  “Oh?”

  Put on the spot, with Dammerung’s inquisitive eye lying lightly upon him, Gro clenched his lips in a thin line and looked, for a moment, as if he meant to politely bow out of explaining. Margaret liked him and she felt sore on his account for Mark Roy singling him out. But a moment later he lifted one hand, as if the explanation lay in the palm of it, and said frankly, “There was some quarrel between him and my lady, and the wound has never closed.”

  “So you choose rather to make it mortal,” said Dammerung without any tone of disapproval. “They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned but I find sending flowers to a man scorned lacks any potency. Still,” he smiled, “I think she made a good choice, your lady. You may have the field before Lifoy. And God help his soul.”

  Lord Gro nodded wordlessly and Dammerung turned to Mark Roy. “I hope you have no especial place to be because I need you to take Aikin and Brand under your wings. Aikin—I don’t mind where he be, but Brand has the makings of Achilles and I would rather him bang about where you can keep an eye on him.”

  Mark Roy looked troubled. “He had hoped to run among your pack, my lord.”

  “Well I know it,” said Dammerung gently, “but when last I was to let him run among my pack I had a man have his guts torn out at ten yards by the Man of Blood down yonder. Brand is fierce—too fierce as yet: Plenilune has more need of him than of his corpse.”

  “On that score, my lord, we are well agreed.”

  Margaret carefully tucked her arms up close, for her skin was beginning to be cold and she did not want Dammerung to know. He knew, though: she caught his sidewise glance at her face and downward over her arms, but he looked almost faster than thought and no one caught it but herself.

  “Is that all?”

  “Unless you have more for us, that is all. I think we know our places.”

  Dammerung rose and clasped Mark Roy by the forearm. “God’s grace to you, my lord,” he said warmly. “I trust my back to you.”

  “I will be at your shoulder. Gro—”

  The two went away again, ducking out into the thin yellow light, and it struck Margaret that it was almost time.

  “Yes,” said Dammerung, as if she had spoken her thought. “Very soon now, before the day is old. We must have time to tidy up before supper.”

  She shut her eyes and smiled. “Always you are so glib.”

  “Life is war,” he replied lightly. “When you have grasped that you learn to hold life loosely between your fingers, ready to drain away like sand upon the shore. You have long since counted the cost. You are always ready to give up your life, always ready to give a defence. The glibness,” he added introspectively, “is a soldier’s kind of courage.”

  “I know. I have been at this war awhile now: which is what I meant when I told the men in Lookinglass that Plenilune’s old scars have been red for some time. But the glibness does not come to me: I grow afraid, and then angry—”

  “Because you are afraid?” he asked clairvoyantly.

  “Yes, I think so. Because I am afraid. And then the anger sharpens my tongue and I say things so beautifully and I nearly…get myself killed…”

  “Hmm!” He felt about his person, clinking and throwing off sparks of green and yellow light. “You and I are alike in that also. We will bury ourselves in our own mouths.” He slipped
out a knife and passed it to her. It lay flesh-warm in her palm, shaped like part of a shark’s tail, and slick with silver light. “I have to go now,” he said, “and this time I can’t take you with me.”

  She gripped the hilt and hung it at her side. “Don’t worry about me,” she said flatly. “When you are down there between death and the next man’s blade, don’t spare a thought for me. You won’t have time for it. I will handle myself if there needs to be any handling.”

  “I believe it!” He rapped his knuckles on her shoulder where the hardened leather lay, giving off a sweet, nutty sound, and with a jink of light and metal he ducked out without a look back. She was glad for that. She followed him to the tent entryway and watched him fling himself astride Rubico and trot away, dark plumed tail adrift in the mist.

  “Hmm, hmm, hmm…Hmm, hm-hm, hmm…” she began idly. A pheasant rocketed from the hillside and scolded as it banked hard and disappeared toward the south. The sleek form of the agouti warhorse and its glib master the War-wolf slipped through the blue haze of mist and camp-fires. Soft, spluttering thunder seemed to well out from him as he made his way through the soldiers to the division of Horse which he would command. A smile bloomed impulsively on her lips. “Beneath the skies of hueless make—” she began huskily.

  Through tigery midsummer’s brake,

  Wi’ hoofbeats and the thunder-quake,

  Through swimming heat, the air a-shake,

  Rode down the Hawthorn Moon.

  Beneath the skies the dales a-teem

  Wi’ horses and the trumpet’s scream;

  And on his fell brow an argent gleam:

  The Lord of Plenilune.

  She could see Aikin and Brand riding out together, Brand looking like a shard of sunlight and Aikin with his dark hair spiked and dyed red at the ends. She lifted her hand to salute them, as she had once almost done for Centurion, and, as before, caught herself—but she laughed impulsively and turned, leaving the tent to walk across the hillside to an open place where she could watch what went on below. Where the pine-wood thinned she found a bit of flat earth with a convenient tumble of rocks to sit on. Cold, bare seeming under the blank blue sky, she settled on a rock speckled with lichen like a peewit’s egg, pulled her knees up to her chest, and rested her chin on her knees.

  She found she had not given much forethought to the elements of battle, but it unfolded not unlike the way she had been expecting. She vaguely remembered hearing—like glimpsing things in a dream—of the distant conquests of what had once been her Imperial Britain. But those had all been so far off and confused even at the time, things she only heard in passing as one man told another, and had never been shapes clear enough to her for her to see. She had never thought about dry-mouthed, cold-skinned, sweating men all in lines with bayonets, smelling smartly of gun powder and fear. Those things had been kept at a great distance by hangings of silk and the breakers of waves. But the only silk here was the silk she wore and the silk that fluttered colourfully over the numerous regiments; the only breakers were the rolling grasses that heaved up the sides of the hills and broke in swells and little points of pimpernel-red at her feet. The images called out to her in a strangely familiar way, far more familiar than the burn of powder or the dark Indian face: high Teutonic sentiment, pale as electrum, and the awful blare of war-horns, seemed to gleam in a long stark glare over the valley.

  Under the glare was a riot of medieval colour, flecked and fierce as a grouse’s wing: silvers and golds and the warm ruddy colour of the common sorrel horse, guards in scarlet livery, a mounted archery brigade in slashed greens, the blue of a rolled cloak on someone’s arm, saffron-bloom amid a field of sable Foot…Over the orderly mess flew the Colours, coiling through mist and sunlight like living things, living things all the hues imaginable in a world where colours were proud of their stark richness. The sight of them struck a fire under Margaret’s breastbone. There were yellows like honey, running in the gloom and looking for the light, yellows like falcon-eyes looking this way and that over the men that rallied to them; blues like periwinkle that seemed to laugh and blues of indigo that seemed like foreboding; among the reds were every colour that blood could be; among the greens was one checked with white so that it looked like a field of clover.

  There were animals, too: she saw the Falcon of Capys and the Falcon of Thrasymene, she saw the Boar of Gemeren and the Golden Dragon of Orzelon-gang. Only she did not see the Hound of the Mares beside the Boar. A rough bit of blue silk fluttered at the end of an ash-shaft, that was all: the proper banner was at the other end of the valley. But Margaret thought that the men who followed the ragged bit of blue had better cause and will to fight than did the men under the crisp and formal Hound.

  Margaret shifted on the rock: the stone bit into her pelvis and she wished, belatedly, that she had brought a pillow, but she did not dare run back for one. The chilly morning hour dragged on. The sun was now well up, casting the western half of the valley in a fierce yellow light and sending her shadow streaming away down the hillside. Regiments moved through burning mist and blue shadow; the soft thrum of men’s feet and horses’ hooves moved the air even as high as where Margaret stood. Horns called briefly, sharply, scoldingly. There were always people moving independently about between the ranks, messengers riding at full tilt between captain and captain with the sod flying roughly from their mounts’ feet. She watched as the Foot were moved into place in a great wedge-shape at the centre, an enormous black spear-head with a mounted archer troop of Mark Roy’s on either forward-facing flank. Someone with a black, gold-flecked banner was held in reserve behind Dammerung’s Horse on the left wing; Sparling at the head of the Thrasymene Horse formed a dense square behind the colourful ranks of Horse under Aikin and Brand on the right wing.

  With a shock Margaret realized that she could no longer see the mingled blue and gold of the Capys banner. She searched the ranks until her eyes smarted but nowhere among all those Colours could she find the familiar Falcon. It had vanished. She could just make out Dammerung’s figure at the head of the left cavalry wing: he did not look concerned. Did he know? Surely—

  There was nothing she could do about it, and what did she know of war? Like a spectator of some foreign drama she could only watch and hope the actors knew their lines. Her heart began to quicken again with a new and formless terror.

  At last, though the messengers were still flying to and fro like dark martlets over the turf, everything seemed ready. One horn called out from high up on the western fell where Aikin Ironside stood. Dammerung’s cornet began to call back, but broke off suddenly as if it had been choked, and then it began again, this time in the tell-tale trou trou tro-o-u-u-u that was meant, in the chase, to call huntsmen together.

  It was like Dammerung to take so cavalier a view of things.

  There was another pause for about a quarter of an hour—Margaret’s legs began to ache but she could not bring herself to get up and walk about—then, with a ghostly silence, the Foot began to move forward. It was uncanny to watch them from her height, to see the black mass moving at a lope across the uneven valley floor like a deathly tide. No horn called. There was a soft splutter of thunder from the flanking Horse... Then, from the neck of the valley, a trumpet screamed its scarlet call and the enemy Foot began to move as well, with two lines of Horse sweeping down on either side to hedge the middle grounded fight in from any mounted aid. Arrows were loosed: the air between was thick with black splinters, looking to Margaret, at her distance, like a cloud of windswept pine-needles. It did good work: the friendly Horse dropped the first few ranks of the mounted enemy and caused momentary havoc among the following lines. Another volley followed, mingling in the air with the first answering volley of the enemy, and then the lines closed. It looked like two waves meeting, sable and white, crashing and mingling and grinding almost to a halt while the Horse battled it out fiercely on either side.

  Another horn! Margaret yanked her attention away from the middle of the field to see t
he enemy’s left wing sweeping up in full career, line after line of beautiful, deadly bodies with the sun making a glory of their naked swords. They crossed the shallow stream and gained the old dike, then came on up the level turf with the birchwood on one side of them and the mess of engaged Horse and Foot on the other. It was a squeeze for them. There was no getting by that dense crowd: Aikin and Brand would have to cut their way through.

  She did not get to see Mark Roy’s sons come down to meet that charge. Even as the enemy Left made the open ground, the familiar note of Dammerung’s cornet shivered in the air, close and clear and thrilling. The red Rose of Hol and the plum-coloured banner of Lifoy were stirring, poised on the brink of charging, and already Dammerung’s Horse was flowing into the wide ground between. They had plenty of elbow-room: the turf and hillsides were treeless and, unlike the western side of the dale, there was no watercourse they had to watch for underhoof. Rank after rank, rider knee to knee with the next rider, Dammerung took his troops at a steady trot down the gently sloping turf. They were near enough that the thunder of their movement made Margaret’s heart shake. Each successive line was staggered from the one before it so that, if one escaped the pounding of the first row, one was sure to be crushed under the next. She was not breathing: she watched fixedly as the first three hundred or so mounted troopers broke off from the reserves and moved out well into the open. A moment later Lord Gro had started, making a checked pattern with his block of horses and Dammerung’s, side by side, two compact regiments of Horse moving at a gentle but deadly swing down the valley.

  Bloodburn and Lifoy were in motion. In one wall they moved together, compact but confusing at that distance. Margaret was glad she was not among the soldiers: she was not sure she had courage enough—or glibness enough—to meet such an onslaught. They came swiftly to meet Dammerung, swift as the enemy’s left wing had charged up to meet Aikin and Brand. She winced. They would shatter the friendly Left at that speed.