Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

  Instead Dammerung took hold of her arm again, thrust his fingers between his lips, and blew a shrill whistle.

  There was a stirring along the thinned picket-line. The panther jerked his head up, muzzle stained purple, scarlet dripping from bared teeth. He was looking hard at Dammerung, questioning, daring, but Dammerung did not look back. Trailing his lead Rubico rounded the end of the picket-line and came at a swallow’s gallop up the hillside. Margaret watched the bloodlust move in the panther’s eyes. The warhorse’s path would have to cross Rupert’s. In a moment, a few more strides, the panther would have it. Still the horse came on, never swerving to the right or the left.

  Without realizing what she was doing Margaret spread her hands, tensed, as if she were going to gather up the ground in them and fold them over the horse herself—she, who had not a flicker of power in her entire being.

  The panther was not watching Dammerung now. In a chink of time he had been put aside, smothered in a blinding spitefulness—the spitefulness that had killed Spencer—and with a white laughter Dammerung took his chance. The panther gathered to spring, paw rising to crush the horse in two; the War-wolf stepped forward, flickered, and seemed to disappear. Margaret could never afterward describe it adequately: he seemed to go away into the ether, or to wrap the ether around him, to pull the frontiers of numinous air and airlessness around him as a cloak, passing through the midst of things unseen…

  An arc of light encircled the horse, blue and white-cut like the atmosphere of earth. At the same moment a pillar of fire—with the sense about it of being human—cracked the air and sheared it apart. The air was burning. It was beyond burning. With a force that ripped her breath away Dammerung shivered the air into the netherworld without passing it through the grave. The panther was hurtled backward, opening up darkness and closing it again, beginning to make and to unmake things like stars, to tear up earth and sky and human passion as it went; and still the pillar, eating up the hillside, roared upon the brink of everything now and the everlasting after, a guardian in the gap, a titan at the threshold. Under her feet Margaret felt Plenilune tremble—with fury and with colossal ecstasy—and all the elements flew.

  The panther skin tore away. For a moment she saw Rupert, crouched, braced against the blast, then Rubico was on top of her and she had to swing round, reaching desperately for the black-lightning flicker of the reins, and save herself from being run down.

  “Heel, boy!” she cried. Power seared her flesh until it felt red and raw. Blindly, she reached into the swirl of blue as it engulfed her and, with her heart in her throat, she felt her hand snag and close on the worn leather reins. The next moment her arm was nearly wrenched out of its socket as the stallion plunged and turned on the face of coin, hooves lashing round her head. She felt an iron-hot shoe sing down over her brow; her head yanked back in time to save her cheekbone from a splitting. “Heel! Get down! Whoa-ah!”

  “Be still.”

  The blink of a dragon’s face dashed round them, huge, unreal. Then Dammerung was there in his proper body, foot raised and jammed in the stirrup. His face was thoroughly bloodied but his smile was the same, half-mad, all teeth. He took the reins from her and grabbed a handful of mane; with a spring he was in the saddle and pulling her up after him.

  She grabbed onto his belt as the horse surged beneath them. She glanced back—no sign of Rupert, only a sidewise drift of smoke and the wreckage of a tent. Rubico jerked her back around with a sudden headlong stumble, a twist to the side, and a check and bound that somehow kept them upright.

  “Where are you going?” Margaret shouted in Dammerung’s ear. “What about Rupert?”

  “Centurion needs me!” was the cryptic reply.

  She could say no more; the horse’s pace, gathering into a reckless speed, jarred her words off her tongue between her teeth, her rattling teeth crushed them before she could get them round her tongue again. Faces flew by, faces white and bloodied and blackened by smoke. She saw the sable armbands of the Friends and in amongst them the Whites too, grappling back and forth from tent-line to tent-line. Once, looking over her shoulder again, she caught the nightmarish sight of a pale Standard upraised over the tents, snapping in the high wind, sporting a scarlet flower. The sight of it tasted foul in her mouth but she could not remember why.

  The ground opened up into a low, long depression, interrupted here and there by the knees of the hills, furred a little with woodscrub on the edges, but mostly open, Margaret saw, as Rubico flung himself onto the outskirts of the camp and clear of the last tent. They were facing west: the sun was in her eyes. She saw a confusion of battle-mass locked and grinding in the tiny valley—and upreared against the halo of sunlight, shining like a beacon, the eagle-Standard of Darkling, the tattered black cloth in a riot of wind hanging from its talons.

  “Io! io! io!“ cried Dammerung.

  Widowmaker sang out of the sheath.

  The first wave of soldiers fell back before the war-lord like men giving way before a loosed bull. The next few moments were like living the ring of struck metal. Margaret caught the faces of people around her, never really taking them in but recognizing some of them: she saw Malbrey, encased in leather up to the chin, swinging a claymore at Brand. They were close enough that she heard the drumming whoop of Brand’s war-hammer as he whirled it over his head. Holyoke of Hol—in a spray of yellow cloak—she saw for a moment between Rubico’s forehooves. What became of him she never saw; her world was mostly holding on and keeping out of Dammerung’s way, for he seemed to have forgotten her. He plied about him with Widowmaker, spraying blood in his face—spraying some into hers—shouting, cat-calling, rallying, until the air thrummed with his voice. Once she twisted to avoid his elbow, twisted so far she was at right angles with Rubico’s body, holding onto Dammerung’s belt with one hand, the other strained out for balance, and looking under the War-wolf’s rein-arm she watched the head of someone whose face she did not know, whose name was unknown to her, slide cleanly off his head and spill everything it had been keeping inside down the slumping front of the body. She was too charged with fire in the blood to feel any sickness at the sight.

  A shield-ring. A wall of shields giving back, cracking open to let them through. In the centre of them rose the eagle and beside it astride an angry sorrel horse was Centurion himself, chin-strap askew and darkened with blood, sword in a white-knuckle hand. He jerked the hilt of his sword up to his forehead in salute as Rubico came down with a bang beside him.

  “You must needs watch your flank!” he roared over the din at Dammerung.

  “Well I am glad of your sanguine face today,” the War-wolf retorted. “All our flanks needed watching, and lacked it.”

  “Poor scouts?”

  “Man from the inside!”

  She could not hear what the other said—a new wave was coming against the shield-ring and the noise was overwhelming—but she saw his lips shape the angry invective. He leaned in close. “I saw Capys head southeast into the wood. Who holds the high ground?”

  “The Harlequin is holding Olympus. We have to get you out of this mess and secure the north face. But Rupert is here.”

  Centurion’s head came up, looking toward the high ground, eyes narrowed against a stream of blood. “Well—” He jammed his heels downward in the stirrups. “To dare is to do—isn’t that what your father used to say?”

  “Then let us dare!”

  “Mm!” cried Margaret as the warhorse came around and planted itself hard by the sorrel beast. Her own expletive was lost—which made her angry, because she wanted the comfort of hearing it coming soundly out of her own mouth—in Centurion’s roar of orders.

  “Up shields—together—a-a-and—FORWARD!“

  Shank! clank! Shield-rim kissed shield-rim. At a steady pace, half-running, the ring began to move forward across the uneven ground; Rubico high-stepped between the antsy brown horse and the Standard-bearer. Margaret caught a glimpse of the Standard-bearer’s face: a grim, upraised, stone-wroug
ht thing that might be pleasant at other times; with the shadow across his face he looked like a sentinel of the dead.

  They had rejoined those who had not made it into the ranks of the shield-ring. The ranks suddenly opened out, every man moving as one with his neighbour—chills ran up and down Margaret’s veins to watch them—into a star-burst pattern with half a dozen White soldiers caught in the wedges between. A horn blared a warning; a pack of horsemen, swinging through the low scrub, hit them in the south flank. A wave of desperation flowed in on Margaret from the hard-pressed Darkling soldiers around her. Centurion looked back over his shoulder, looked her way: she saw the tension in his jaw-line.

  But Dammerung, wheeling round, cried, “The back door is going! You—you—you three, come by and run at my flanks. Hie! hie, cousin! Yah!“

  And Rubico, with another of his flying leads, was off again, the star-pattern making way for him and the men running at his heels, all of them yelling for courage and anger—which were easy to mistake one for the other, she thought.

  They fanned out at the last moment and took the onslaught of horsemen in the chest. One man went down almost instantly, but he was good enough to fall with a twist and, with the horseman’s lance in his chest, wrench the rider out of the saddle under the hooves of his horse. The rider got one accidental blow to the head, that was all—the horse sprang clear and trotted off in bewilderment—but that was enough: the White horseman was dead on impact.

  Margaret looped her arms through Dammerung’s belt, clung on for all she was worth, and kept her head down.

  A shield flung down among the knees of the horses rang in the tumult. A snatch of Psalm, shouted at the top of someone’s lungs, broke clear like a hawk banking on a breast of air. Dammerung was half-laughing, half-crying in an agony of exertion; the whirl of the War-wolf’s sword cast bars of sunsetting light on the bloodied turf.

  Why not blow them all to Kingdom come? she wondered as the War-wolf’s muscles screamed in her ears. Why all this bloodshed? Why all this trouble when you could only speak a word and crush them out of life forever?

  She began to hear Dammerung’s battle-name being yelled from man to man. Four horsemen among the White riders were left still in their seats; they checked at Dammerung’s approach, checked at the sight of the sword and a face Margaret could not see from her position. She saw their jarring forms waver, their horses wheel at the bit, but they stood their ground. With an angry wrench her heart went out to them, for it took a man of iron will to stand firm against the kiss of the War-wolf’s steel.

  The first blow severed the head of the horse and stuck in the breastbone of the rider. With a cry Dammerung twisted in the saddle, dragged back by the pull—the blade sang in Margaret’s ear as it was hauled reluctantly out of the bone. But she did not have time to think about it. The next rider had passed by and swung at her, raising the heat of terror in her ear as she ducked and felt the wind of the sword go whistling by. He swung again; she ducked to the other side.

  “I don’t have a sword!” she yelled in Dammerung’s ear, hoping—but not really believing—that she would reach him in the red place to which he had gone.

  Something must have got through to him, for he turned his head toward her voice. His eye, in a face of brown, dried blood, was luminescent silver.

  Like the moon.

  He dropped the reins. Rubico ascended on his hind legs, slowly, inexorably. Before she could begin to slide, the War-wolf reached back with his free hand and grabbed her hard by the shoulder and wrenched her down to the side; her cheek was pressed against his thigh. Like a man wielding a hammer he spun Widowmaker over his head, and from her angle—feeling the powerful muscles in the leg clench and jump with strain—she watched the blue-star point of the sword break open the face of the rider behind.

  Rubico pushed Plenilune out of orbit, back into the frontier realm of Earth. With a bound he shoved the ground away seemed to dislodge from gravitation and all the laws that governed the world. Waiting for the world to reawaken and reclaim them, Margaret put her arm around Dammerung’s waist and held on tightly.

  The horse’s body hit another’s. Metal sang. The sun had gone down and the valley was awash of brown and scarlet shadows with sudden points of flame on swords and buckler-rims. Something warm and running hit Margaret’s face; she smelled iron. The familiar sound of Widowmaker finding home in someone’s body tore open her little envelope of the world; the familiar sound of a surprised, pained grunt, which was the end of a man’s life, clawed gratingly at her ears. Then—

  “S’all, sir! They’ve had it!”

  The warhorse was standing still, head lowered, flanks heaving. The sound of battle still rang from woodshore to distant clearing, but it was breaking up, growing fainter. A bell was banging somewhere, for what reason Margaret did not know.

  “Take the lady,” said Dammerung quietly.

  He let go and she slid, rolling, into the arms of a soldier she could not quite see in the gloom. She stumbled on the ground and felt surprised to find it there.

  “Oh, my lady! What—nay, take thee my arm. What dost about in battle?”

  Plenilune’s buckling subsided at last. Feverishly, she pushed out of the soldier’s arms. “No, I’m fine, thank you,” she insisted, making a concerted effort to sound friendly though her instinct was telling her to strike the man’s hands away and to shout at him to leave her be. “I’m fine. I can walk.”

  With a groan Dammerung’s leg spun against the gold-hammered sky and he dropped, like a rock, out of the saddle. “There, my heart.” His hand sounded smartly against Rubico’s neck. “Let us not, you and I, do that again. We get too old for such things.”

  Margaret forgot the soldier from Darkling. The horse was already walking off—he knew the routine—and as if he were on the lead-line and Rubico was pulling him, Dammerung began to walk beside the horse. Margaret lengthened her stride to fall in step with him. She almost put her arm in his, for his sake, but for his sake she stayed her movement and walked with her hands at her sides.

  He did not speak to her, but then she found she did not expect him to. They passed round fallen bodies, Friend and foe alike, passed the cluster under the eagle where Centurion stood with his lieutenants setting up a camp, getting the watch-fires going, burying the dead, picketing the horses, starting a supper…

  As if anyone could have stomach to eat.

  Dammerung called to a man she did not know. “I saw you! Very neatly done.”

  She could hear the blush in the dark. “Sooth, sir, and thank you!”

  They went on.

  “I saw you get thrown out of the saddle and thought you were lost. Lived to fight another day, eh?”

  “Oh, aye, Lord Dammerung. Bit of a bump, ’tis all.”

  “Best have it looked at.”

  “There be men that need the surgeon’s attention more than me, my lord.”

  “A fine weapon, sir. An heirloom?”

  “My Lord Dammerung! I—yes, sir. ’Twas of my family’s line, my father’s and his father’s before him.”

  “You bear it proudly.”

  “Trouble thee about thy horse, my lord. I’m going to fetch fodder. May I bring thee a pitchfork-full?”

  “No small thanks to your courtesy, captain, but Rubico has an iron stomach. He will pass for now with a mouthful of grass and a handful of grain. There are others need your pitchfork-full of hay more.”

  “Good-night, Lord Dammerung!”

  “Good-night, sir! Good-night, lady!”

  The voices called across the darkness as the light went out of the sky and the last brazen clang of sword-work finally vanished from the woods. Margaret walked wordlessly along the incline beside Dammerung, tired beyond reckoning, her eyes wandering from new-sprung fire to new-sprung fire.

  I wonder where the enemy goes when we defeat them. Do they slink back to their own camp? How strange that it is so quiet now, like every night in camp before this, like this morning, before…

  Out
of the surf-sound of the rising wind she heard in memory the noise that raised the bile in her throat: the sound of panic, the sound of a battle in the heart of the camp, so sudden, so unexpected, upon them before anyone could think. It had been some moments, not until the war-lords of the camp had sunk their teeth into the threat and stayed its rampage, before she had felt anything but terror. And then she had been angry.

  “Oh.”

  Dammerung had stopped. She had come blindly up a bit of earthy, shelving ground, across a burnt patch of grass, and stood beside him before what had been his tent. Her bottle of perfume must have been broken: she could smell it distinctly.

  “I don’t care,” she said wearily, not sure if she meant the bottle or the tent.

  Dammerung, putting one arm over the horse’s neck to support himself, waved his other hand unceremoniously through the air. The fabric of the tent hissed and snapped; the bones of the tent came together, bone to bone. With awkward, jerky movements, like a camel getting to its feet, the thing came back together and stood, shivering in the wind, the flap over the entryway burnt and shredded, but beckoning half-heartedly.

  “Why didn’t you do that before?”

  Dammerung went in, pulling Rubico after him. Candles—it did not seem to matter where they were, on the ground or on tables or chairs—lit up at once. Margaret blinked and staggered back in the sudden light.

  Dammerung picked up a chair from the mess—there were still a few charred bits of Púka lying about—and sat down heavily in it. His first two fingers flickered wordlessly and she went to him. “Put your left hand against my right shoulder,” he told her, “and take hold of my shoulder with your right hand.”

  “Oh, this game?” She felt her stomach clenching already.

  There was a brief flicker of laughter in his upturned eyes. “This game. Have you got it?”

  She took hold and felt the limb out of joint beneath her palm. Distaste pulled at her mouth.