Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

  What must it be like for the prisoner, she wondered with a shudder, to have to stare back into that violent disapproval?

  “What is your name?”

  “Púka,” the man said stiffly. His lip did not appear to work very well on one side. “Bazel Púka.”

  “You are native to Orzelon-gang, then.”

  The man did not speak, but his face affirmed.

  The hand lifted, tightening into a fist; Dammerung rested his chin on his knuckle. “It appears that you have an appetite for corpses.”

  Púka twisted one imprisoned shoulder carelessly. “It could be worse.”

  “Truly?” the War-wolf’s throat growled. “Truly, I am not so sure. The living have a say and might strike back—hast got a woman’s claws across your cheek before?—but the dead are silent and motionless, and depend wholly on Christian charity for decency.”

  With a little look round, Púka asked back, “Hast thou ever, sir?”

  Every body in the tent chamber stiffened except Dammerung’s. Huw made a visible movement which looked like a flinch away from the prisoner, as though expecting Dammerung’s lightning to strike the man at any moment and he did not want to be too close. Margaret flushed with angry surprise and wondered if the man Púka knew to whom and to what he was speaking.

  His eye momentarily straying among the heavily-clad feet of the men, the War-wolf murmured rhythmically, “How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot…Do you know—” he seemed to come back out of himself “—what I do with men like you?”

  The breath of mortality chilled the soldier’s cheek. His throat involuntarily clenched as if it could already feel the noose about it.

  “I was answered that once, by a man who thought I was altogether such a one as himself.” The War-wolf got up, tall-seeming and cloaked in dread. The reflection of him glinted back out of the sudden swell of black in Púka’s eye. “You will hang, and you will hang high, and you will hang long, and the crows will come and pick your flesh—and you, like all the dead, will not be able to stop them.”

  The eyes, blackened by the promise of a swift drop into death, tore off the War-wolf’s face and found Margaret’s. She felt him call across to her, proudly, stiffly, yet desperately. But if he thought to find some solace and womanly compassion in her, he was sorely mistaken. Dammerung’s words had laid hot bars across her heart and she was impenetrable.

  “Nay, sirrah,” she spoke lowly, huskily. “Do not look to us for mercy. Our hearts are iron-clad.”

  “Nor have you any right to ask a lady for her kerchief,” said Dammerung acidly. He thrust his hand, fingers spread, toward the tent opening. “Get him out of my sight and bind him: let him be, but bind him.” He stepped away, dragging his dark aura after him, but swung back at the last moment. “You wanted a cold companion,” he said. Púka’s cheeks paled. “You’ll find death’s kiss very cold indeed.”

  “Hie with you,” snapped Huw, and jerked the man about. They went, with a little more prodding from Huw than was strictly necessary, Margaret thought, but then the ex-thief was probably glad for the excuse to strut a little.

  Skander said something level and appreciative to the others and they, too, left—Margaret heard Aikin say in passing to Brand that he had better follow along after Huw and be of help. Finally they were all gone—Gro, unlike himself, doubled back and bade them good-night at the tent-flap—and it was only Skander and Dammerung and herself in the soft haze of lamp-smoke and the feeling that her bath had been in vain.

  Dammerung was staring at things he could not look away from, though she could see from the whiteness of his eyes that he wished to. His shadow seemed to move of its own accord and sang a little along the edges with a brief marshlight flame.

  “Dammerung,” she called quietly. “Come back out of the cellar now.”

  “A moment...” he said without moving. Then, with a deep breath, he seemed to break out of the spell of his own thoughts.

  Her brows quirked with a spasm of sympathy. “Is it very hard being you?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Aikaterine,” said Skander as the maid stepped in out of the dark, “I would rather you slept in here tonight. You can bed by Lady Margaret—if she does not herself object.”

  “Of course not.” Margaret met the maid’s surprised, questioning eye. “I should not feel easy myself if she were elsewhere. Oh, Dammerung,” she added as the blue-jay man followed hard on Aikaterine’s heels, “you need a haircut. Would Skander’s man do?”

  But Dammerung had oozed onto a couch and had rolled over, his shoulder to her, and she knew in a moment she would lose him. “One must look one’s best for a hanging... In the morning. Could you find me some sort of blanket, Spencer?”

  Skander turned, surprised, from digging among the litter on his table. But before he could say anything Margaret swept her hands harshly through the air, shutting his half opened mouth, and she dragged a rug off the back of a nearby chair. Dammerung’s introverted form, ruddy in the lamplight, was easily engulfed by the blanket. She bent into the shadow as she pulled it over his shoulders; his eyes were open, staring into the further dark, his lips set in a thin angry line.

  “You look green,” she whispered.

  He rustled his shoulders but did not look up. “I am angry,” he confessed. “Can you blame me?”

  She opened her mouth to assure him she was just as angry as he, but he went on in spite of her.

  “I am angry that it happened. I was hoping we might make it through a whole season without…” His voice trailed off and presently he began again. “I am angry that I have to hang a man—not for the man’s sake, for he made his own choice, but for the simple selfish fact that my own gut crawls at the thought of the drop and the snap. But most of all I am angry that you had to know.”

  The fox in him flashed out so keenly she half expected the backward curl of his lips to reveal all pointed teeth. She sat down on the edge of the couch and crossed one knee over the other. In the background Skander was talking to the blue-jay man, quietly, comfortably, and Aikaterine was making up a bed for herself and Margaret. Dammerung, like a mature fire, smouldered inside himself and only she, Margaret felt, could reach out and touch him and not be burned.

  “I’m a big girl,” she told him. “I was not lying when I said we have guts of steel.”

  “I have seen human guts,” he said coldly. “I know they are not metal made.”

  So, he had caught his own mistake and that, too, was gnawing at him. A sudden desperation, which felt a lot like anger, to rid him of his dark mood rose up in her. In that same husky tone, like one of the Thrasymene women, she said levelly, “It will be over and we will get through it, and—God help us—it will be done. And we are the high, strong people of Plenilune who will not let on that we bleed and that we feel and that we ache and that we grow weary in the middle of the battlefield. We will not let on that there is a little of the fool among the gold.” She got up. “Go to sleep, War-wolf, and bloody your teeth tomorrow.”

  He rolled over and looked up at her, squinting through the lamplight. “Your heel is sharp,” he laughed. “Why—why—was he such a fool as to pick you?”

  It was a backhanded compliment, but it was the familiar stuff of his soul and she smiled back, content that he was better, and left him, musing on the torment of a great genius, to curl up in her own doeskins and stare out at the breathing dark, her back to Aikaterine’s. She had spoken colourfully, bluntly, because that was what had been needful, but in her heart she nursed a wretched sickness—just as she was sure Dammerung did too—and she wondered to herself, Why do I feel what little is left standing of the world is about to crumble?

  She was not surprised the next morning when the news came that no trace of Bazel Púka was to be found.

  28 | The Witching Thing

  Margaret stepped back with a sharp, angry cry into the tent opening as a whirlwind of fire, dislodging from the chaos, passed across her chee
k. Her vision sang with white light, then cleared away again in fragmented, floating petals of brilliance, torn up by the black bulk of the panther and the crack of spells.

  In a lithe arc Dammerung sailed by her and turned back on one hind paw, raising a column of dirt and turf, parting the ground as the hand of God had parted the Red Sea. He was huge, as big as the panther that now faced him, tail lashing. His face was a singing hot-iron white, his body shifting in and out of being flame and scarlet fur; he had nearly a dozen tails—they moved too quickly for Margaret to count them—and they stroked up the wind into a tempest behind him. The eyes gleamed; one paw lifted a fraction—it had been white; it was red now. He was still for just long enough for Margaret to get a clear view of his face, as she had not been able to do since the moment he had flung himself through the tent opening into the jaws of the panther. He was angry, she could see, yet oddly happy. As the wind of his own fury swept the soft white hair on his brow it parted just enough in that moment to reveal a single bar of gold running down his forehead—nothing more, and yet the sight of it chilled Margaret in the heart-place. She did not need to have seen that mark before to hear it speaking its name to her.

  Resurrection.

  The two war-lords came together. The panther reared, shrieking until her bones rattled; it swung one massive paw at the fox’s head. At the last second the fox ducked, hindquarters clenching, and sprang in under the panther’s elbow, snapping his teeth for the flesh along the ribs. Neither struck. The panther’s blow fell wide and cut into the ground. The empty clack of the fox’s teeth—like a gun going off at close quarters—shocked out a ring of endless light that sheared off a heavy portion of turf and dismantled a tree that stood behind the tent. Margaret half turned at the sound of crashing limbs but did not dare look away for long.

  Rupert knocked Dammerung down. There was a shearing of cloth as the body—flickering between a man and a fox—crashed through the side of a tent, skidded into a pile of Capys blue, and then erupted again, cloth sailing round the lean, twisting shoulders. Rupert sprang, the muscles beneath his shimmering night-coloured coat clenching and stretching; the hair along his spine rose higher and higher, catching fire and shining phosphorescent blue. Margaret looked for a thing to throw but there was nothing sizeable to hand. She opened her mouth to shout but at the same moment, by some wicked sense of genius, it seemed the black side of the moon had sensed her cry: her stomach shifted forward, straining against her skin. Pain screamed in her middle and she fell back, gasping, clutching her stomach before it was torn out of her the way it had been torn out of Spencer.

  You horrible, God-forsaken, spit-hearted blackguard. I despise you! She swallowed, struggled, and tried again.

  All that came out was a gurgling croak and the intense feeling that she was going to vomit. Through her parted strands of hair she saw the enormous panther come down, like a little hunting cat, on the place where, a second before, Dammerung had been wresting himself out of the wreckage of the tent. Dammerung himself was nowhere to be seen, but as the paws touched the ground and the shock-wave of weight nearly flung Margaret to her face, there was a great crash of noise and light and, from somewhere down the hillside, Skander’s voice roaring through the chaos—

  “Hell damn it, you bastards—we can’t see!“

  Rupert’s teeth let out a surprised yowling scream and he rocketed sideways, landing on his feet. With the side of his face in ribbons and his arm hanging at a grotesque angle, Dammerung emerged in a swell of blue thunder, staggering a little, but very angry and determined to have done.

  Suddenly Skander was there, Blue-bottle Glass a king of fury and triumphant movement against the evening sky, with his lashing forehooves dancing dangerously near Dammerung’s head. “We’re going into Holywood,” he shouted, leaning down so that his cousin could hear him. “Do well enough here?”

  “Fine. Put your hand a moment here.”

  Skander dropped off his horse’s back while the panther looked on hungrily, courtesy galling him. With a firm grip Skander took Dammerung’s shoulder in hand, braced himself, and held still while his cousin twisted himself violently into the embrace. There was the sound of a little click, muffled by the distance: Margaret’s wounded stomach crawled. But Dammerung staggered out of Skander’s hold—and suddenly there was no bloody, sweating young man in a tattered sable tunic but the fox again—a huge humming, many-splendoured thing—rushing without check into the panther’s jaws.

  Before they met Skander was already in the saddle, Blue-bottle Glass already wheeling to run; Rupert’s counterblast singed the hocks of the animal as it tore screaming down the hillside. There was a sound like a hammer hitting a gong, a whirling planet of light, a ring in singing motion, a spray of stars—to Margaret it seemed the whole cosmos had met in the teeth and claws and angry, defiant wills of the two men slashing and biting on the uneven green before her. She winced and tensed and strained for Dammerung’s sake, as though by so doing she might lend him a little energy where he might most need it.

  At the sound of rending cloth she sprang round like a loosed bowstring. Between an intruding bough and a metal upright in the tent’s side a soldier’s cavalry sword was cutting a way in. She stepped back into the opening of the tent; magic raised the hairs on the back of her neck and sent the wildest sensations of thrones and dominions singing into her skin.

  With a twist and a thrust the soldier got in and stumbled a little over a bit of rug. He wore the familiar black scarf of Friend about his upper arm, but as he raised his head and got a look at her, and she of him, she recognized him at once.

  The rack of Standards went over outside, crashing and clattered with a chill foreboding of disaster.

  “The humour in it is,” said Bazel Púka, “that he thinks I’m fetching you for him.”

  “You bastards,” she said with the tone of one putting one’s foot down.

  He sprang for her and she sprang to the side, hands reaching for the nearest serviceable object. She had never been so little frightened in her life: the emotions she felt chiefly were annoyance at being torn away from Dammerung’s snarling fight and anger at the unwelcome demotion of Lady Spitcat to a mouse.

  The first thing she found was a metal map-case, half as long as she was tall, and she swung it as soon as her hands closed over it. Púka, surprised, was taken off guard and in the right temple with a satisfying clang. The shock ground up into Margaret’s arms and the metal tube bent over on itself from the impact. She dropped it and ran for the next weapon while he stumbled after her, cursing, strong as a warhorse and as lithe as a racing hound. She went over a table and dropped to the ground underneath it; he grasped the edge and heaved it over, like a boy kicking over the top of an ants’ nest, but she had already gathered, cursing her skirts, and was leaping for a nearby couch. There was nothing on it but a rug, but she snatching it up anyway, whirled—there was nowhere else to go—and flung it over the quickly-moving bulk of the soldier bearing down on her. Half of it he shaved off, cutting her arm, but the rest, with a little cry of determination, she got wrapped round his head somehow and then it was her turn, with a sense of exultant power, to dig in her heels and heave over on him, driving him backward while he shook and writhed and swore and growled under her grasp like ten tomcats in a weakening sack.

  “A pawn!” she screamed, too angry to care how hennish she sounded. “A pawn, do you think? to be snatched up at will by any comer? You fool! You fool—who could not even court a corpse!”

  He cried something damnably about all women, dropped down onto one knee, the rug slipping sideways, and grabbed her with one alarmingly large hand under her breast—the ribs that Rupert had broken. A sudden shock of memory, of pain and torment, lanced through her brain. She knew her defence was going down and was too blind with nauseating fear to stop it. The next moment she was going over, the ground rising up to meet her back, the man Púka had a knee on her sternum and was stooping to gather her up.

  “Io-o-o-o!“ the air roared
. “Io! io! io!“ Something—a man and a fox and a dragon all at once—seemed to explode between her and the man Púka and to thrust them from each other, and then, by the same force, riding on the manic wave of movement, she and the confusion of man were tumbling clear, out of the tent, out of the ragged blue fabric, across a lawn and into a crashing tomb of scrub trees and undergrowth.

  “Hoc habet!” cried Dammerung, getting up on his knees. But he was not looking at her. Out of the ringing of sensations Margaret rolled onto her bruised elbow; through the parting of the grasses which a tempest from the War-wolf was flattening she saw the hulking shoulders of the panther tearing down the tent, heard the crack of wood and the snap of metal, and watched, without feeling anything—that frightened her most—as Rupert caught the errant ex-soldier and began to play with him, skilfully, furiously, all his claws extended, just as a cat plays with his dinner before he eats it. A swipe—a part of Púka went flying, bloodily, with a piercing scream; two swipes and a batter of teeth made several living pieces of the man. Dammerung got up, his fists clenched, a ring of blackened gold around the crest of him; taking her eyes off the wreck of Bazel Púka, Margaret saw, for a moment, a kinship between him and his brother which had never been before, which would never be again.

  “To have done that myself—” he growled, then seemed to remember her as Púka’s last scream was cut short by a clawed blow across the mouth. The pale eye focused out of the bloody face that framed it. It was curiously like a touch, and out of the shimmering welter of thunderbolt and counterblast she felt his mind again. He reached out—

  —She swung up her hand and grasped his forearm. With a jerk he pulled her to her feet. “Go on!” she panted. With a violent shove she pushed up the cloth on her arm and squinted dispassionately at the gory laceration. “I’ll be fine. Go on!”