The first and last regiments were cavalry, from whose ranks outriders regularly parted to ride up and down the army’s flanks, halloing from sheer joy at their own speed. The horsemen wore silvery gray jackets, navy blue trousers, and tall black shakos, all liberally besmeared with mud. The steeds were tired, and their heads drooped, but they still raced with pride and fire when their masters spurred them forward.
Between the regiments of cavalry marched the multitude of infantry. Pikemen and swordsmen and archers all dressed in the ragged remnants of dark blue uniforms. Some still walked, but more limped and hobbled. A few sang marching songs, but most concentrated on the task of putting one foot in front of the other. Their thin clothes flapped in the feeble breeze.
In the very center of the army, drovers in muddy brown coats whipped and cursed at the black oxen who dragged hundreds of creaking carts. By their side, in an island of coiling silence, a hundred fur-clad bear-priests manned large ebony wagons draped with black curtains. The soldiers kept as far from the bear-priests’ grim wagons as possible.
An oval of bears encircled the Mayor’s army. They padded on dust and stones, sniffed the air, and constantly licked their lips. They looked hungrily at the men they guarded and growled softly to one another. Clovermead tried to eavesdrop on them, but they were too far away to be heard distinctly.
“Will you turn from here?” asked Sorrel grimly. “Or must we ride into an enemy army surrounded by toothed demons?”
“We go on,” said Clovermead, though her stomach squirmed and she had more than half a mind to run screaming. Only her tooth was brave—savage and hungry, but fearless. It gave her courage when she clutched it to her. “We have to. Father’s here.”
“Evidently I was born under a short-lived star. Now I understand most viscerally the phrase the jaws of death. Dear Lady preserve us,” Sorrel prayed, and he kicked Shilling forward.
The Army of Low Branding rushed up before them. A few soldiers idly watched them approach, but no one made any great fuss. The bears at the back of the army parted easily to let Clovermead and Sorrel inside the oval, then sprang back into position. Clovermead had a feeling that it would be harder to leave the ring of bears than it had been to get inside.
A redheaded cavalry officer cantered up to Clovermead and Sorrel as they left the bears behind. He yawned as he came to their side, and covered his mouth with a hand that was missing three fingers. “Messenger or commissary?” he asked. He swayed in his saddle and his breath stank of alcohol. “I hope commissary,” he confided, leaning low toward Clovermead and Sorrel. “We need fresh food. Huh, you’re young. You must be commissary—the Mayor wouldn’t send messages with children!” He hooted with laughter.
“We were sent by the quartermaster into the Lakelands to procure rations,” Sorrel said with sudden, cringing humility. Clovermead hastily imitated his servile crouch. “We could not extract food from those farmers.”
“Course you didn’t,” said the cavalryman. He hiccuped. “Those Lakefolk have teeth—if he’d asked me, I’da told the quartermaster that myself. They don’t take to requisitioning. You didn’t get anything?” he asked mournfully. Sorrel and Clovermead shook their heads. “In you go, then,” said the redhead, waving them forward. His hand wobbled as he waved. “I should ask you the password,” he confided, “but I’m ab-so-lute-ly soused, and I don’t remember it myself. Doesn’t matter. Ain’t a spy stupid enough to come through all these bears. Have to be mad to let bear-priests surround you with monsters. Or drunk. I’m not mad, so I got drunk. I’d go mad otherwise,” he concluded with a serene smile.
“Can you tell us where the quartermaster is?” asked Sorrel. “We must report to him.”
“Dunno. Somewhere by the carts,” said the soldier. “That’s where you commissary slaveys work, ain’t it? Not the prison carts, I guess, unless you’re serving the bear-priests dinner. And they’ll eat you for dinner if you get too close to them!” He bubbled over with terrified laughter and slapped his horse’s neck.
“Thank you, sir,” said Sorrel. He bowed deeply, then led Shilling into the heart of the Mayor’s army. “We will hide in the commissary, yes?” he muttered to Clovermead. “Evidently we will attract less attention there.”
Thousands of men marched along and hardly spoke, only glanced surreptitiously from time to time at their ursine escorts. They were unshaven and shivered with cold, and their uniforms hung loosely on their too thin bodies. The tramp of their boots was louder than their words. A great many of them were drinking, slowly and steadily. The few whom drink got fighting mad were quickly knocked unconscious by their fellows, before their shouts might attract the attention of the bears.
“I feel sorry for them,” said Clovermead. “They look like condemned prisoners on the night before the execution.”
“They deserve execution,” Sorrel said savagely. “They are butchers.” He looked around him again, sighed, and shook his head. “Ah, Clovermead, I am mistaken. These are scarecrows, not butchers. Perhaps they once were butchers, but no more. I wish they did not look so miserable and pathetic. Now it is hard to hate them properly.” His mouth set into a thin line. “Still, I will not object if the bears swallow these murderers. It will be justice.”
They came to the commissary at last. Harried men, women, and boys ran back and forth, digging out barrels from the bottom of the moving carts, sorting the contents, and dashing off with them to other parts of the army. Within each cart was a jumbled mess of cooking pots, rock-hard biscuits, barrels of flour, and casks of wine.
Clovermead shuddered fastidiously at the sight of the mess. Goody Weft would never have allowed this sort of hugger-mugger confusion in the Ladyrest kitchen.
Sorrel and Clovermead tied Shilling to a cart where other horses were already tethered and then walked boldly among the commissary boys. Immediately a harried old woman grabbed them, put empty casks into their hands, and screamed out an order to fill the casks with water. She shoved Sorrel and Clovermead toward a small oasis by the roadside, crammed with commissary boys on the same errand, all in a hurry to fill their casks and buckets before the army had marched on. The oasis was drained dry when the boys were done. Afterward they were called to hold up a provisions cart while the wheelwright repaired its broken axle. By the time the cart was fixed, the crescent moon was high in the sky and the army had made camp. Then Sorrel and Clovermead carried armloads of rancid beef and cheese to the stew pots, where fifty men cooked supper for the army. When that was done, they carried water and wine to infantry regiments camped in the treeless mud.
Past midnight, sitting by Shilling’s side, they wolfed down bits of stew the soldiers had left at the bottom of the pots. They were too tired and hungry to care about the taste.
Sorrel smiled. “I am proud of myself. Am I not excellently nonconspicuous?”
“Extremely nonconspicuous,” Clovermead agreed. “I don’t think anyone knows we’re here.”
“No one but Our Lady,” said Sorrel. He made the crescent sign. “She favors us with her blessing.”
And Lord Ursus knows we’re here, thought Clovermead bleakly. I think he favors us too.
The next afternoon Clovermead took a bucket of water to the bear-priests’ prison carts. She made as if to water the oxen—and a bear-priest strode up to her and slammed her bucket to the ground. He struck at Clovermead, but she ducked under his blow and scrambled backward.
“Keep away,” the bear-priest growled. His teeth had been filed as sharp as Snuff’s, and he wore a bear tooth around his neck. “Next time you come, I kill you.”
“Yes, sir,” Clovermead squeaked. She bowed low and scrambled away. Her tooth itched at her chest and she dreamed of clawing the bear-priest. She would pay him back for his insolence to a true servant of Lord Ursus! Once she had rescued her father . . .
The next morning Clovermead and Sorrel were ordered to bring firewood to the Mayor’s entourage. Clovermead stole long glances at the Mayor as she dashed back and forth with armfuls of lo
gs. He rode on a surprisingly small and tame gray mare, who looked uncomfortable beneath the weight of her silvered leather saddle and the Mayor’s plump body. The Mayor himself was a greasy man of about sixty, with thin white hair combed vainly over his balding dome. His arms and legs stuck out like matchsticks from his soft dumpling stomach. His face was a stoat’s, and his probing eyes, alive with harsh intelligence, darted suspiciously all around him. As he spoke to his accompanying aides Clovermead heard a golden voice that commanded, complimented, and chastised with equal facility. His aides obeyed him quickly, some even with the appearance of devotion.
Half the ranks of the Mayor’s honor guard were patricians of Low Branding—tall, slender, laughing young men perfumed and exquisite in a rainbow of cloaks and finely ornamented suits of armor. They rode Phoenixians with arrogant style, heedless of the common soldiers and servants they forced to leap out of their way. The other half were bear-priests. They had wolves’ heads for caps and blood-spattered bearskins for capes, and they imperturbably exposed their bare flesh to the cold. Each had a necklace with a bear tooth. All the bear-priests were huge—more than six feet tall and thick with muscle. Their unsheathed broadswords were Clovermead’s height and thicker across than her leg. Their cheeks and scalps were matted tangles of black wire and gray grizzle. Their finger-nails were long and thick, and their mouths twisted into rictuses of hunger. Their eyes were black holes that thirsted for blood. While the patricians chattered, they rumbled like beasts, or were silent.
Clovermead looked gingerly among them. “I don’t see Snuff,” she whispered to Sorrel.
“Thank Our Lady for small favors,” Sorrel whispered back. “He would spy us at once and deliver us to the tender mercy of his compatriots.”
“Maybe. But we have to find him sooner or later. How else will we find my father? Or should we go peeking at each prison cart tonight?” Sorrel’s only answer was a low moan.
But when they skulked to the perimeter of the sable-blanketed prison carts that night, they found a blazing circle of torchlight and dozens of patrolling bear-priests. The bear-priests’ eyes were cat large, and they sniffed the air hungrily.
“Don’t they sleep?” asked Sorrel.
“Sleep is for weaklings,” said Clovermead. “Lord Ursus grants sleeplessness as one of his gifts.” Her voice was low and guttural; she whispered Lord Ursus’ name with fear and love.
The following day the army traversed a rubbly wasteland of sharp rocks and ripped-up flagstones that sliced boots to tatters and wedged horseshoes off of hooves. The Mayor ordered a special ration of wine for all the soldiers, and Sorrel and Clovermead carried sacks of wine to every regiment. The soldiers clapped their wine bearers hard on their backs, teased Clovermead for her beardless youth, and spoke to them with rough kindness.
At evening they camped by a shallow creek that Sorrel identified as the last stream in the Heath east of Chandlefort. The whole army gathered by its banks to drink. Sorrel took a small sip of muddy water and filled his canteen. Clovermead knelt by the creek and dipped a finger through the skein of ice to the water beneath. She brought the finger to her mouth and wrinkled her nose. “Ugh, it’s filthy. How can you drink this?”
Sorrel shrugged. “Fill up. If you take no water now, you will regret it later.” Sullenly Clovermead followed his advice.
In the morning the army marched through a parched plain, monotonously flat but for the regular row of teardrop-shaped pillars along the road. Each sunset red column was fifteen feet tall and tapered to a point on the west side.
“Lady Cindertallow’s great-grandmother put those up,” said Sorrel. “There are hundreds of them. Every taper points to Chandlefort.”
“Doesn’t that make it easy for invading armies?” asked Clovermead.
“There were none then. They showed the way for merchants. That proud lady did not know how greatly the world would change.”
“She was a fool,” said Clovermead. Her tooth approvingly echoed her words. Clovermead circled around the nearest pillar. The flaming bee and sword that emblazoned her brooch had been engraved on the pillar’s far side. She reached her hand up to trace the deep grooves a century of blowing sand had etched in the stone. The cold rock chilled her fingers to the bone.
Snow swirled in again that night. Soldiers shivered close to the fires, denuded the sparse bushes of the Heath for fuel, and roasted a few desert rats unlucky enough to be caught outside their burrows. Sorrel and Clovermead copied the other commissary boys and stole a slab of salt beef meant for a cavalry regiment for their dinner.
“Do you have ideas about how to rescue your father?” asked Sorrel.
“Just one.” Clovermead had been working out the details of a rescue operation all that long day marching through the Heath. Her tooth liked it. The plan required blood, and that would bind her even further to Lord Ursus. Clovermead was afraid of what she would be after she rescued her father, she looked forward to her transformation, she felt both at once. “I don’t like my plan. Have you thought of anything?”
“No,” said Sorrel. “I am sorry.”
“Me too,” said Clovermead. “I guess we’ll have to use mine. Soon. Daddy will be sacrificed when we reach Chandlefort. We have to hurry.”
“Hurry and we make mistakes,” said Sorrel. “Then we die too.”
“We don’t have a choice,” said Clovermead.
Late the next afternoon the Mayor’s army marched into Chandlefort’s fertile demesne. Between the fields stretched eight immense irrigation canals, stone-bottomed spokes that thrust two miles from the castle. Smaller canals threaded out from the great eight, and tinier ones from the small, till they laced a circle around the castle four miles in diameter. The canals had gone dry. The fields between them were dotted with the stumps of chopped-down trees, and some had been burned black from old fires. Drifts of sand encroached on the fertile land.
Clovermead peered forward to where the castle of Chandlefort sat at the hub of the canals. The castle’s outer walls, made of smooth, rosy granite, a dozen feet thick and a hundred feet high, rose with massive grace over the Heath. They formed an eight-pointed star, with high, round towers at the end of each point. On each tower scurrying figures pounded drums and blew trumpets in derisive welcome to the Mayor’s army. At the pinnacle of each tower a huge, polished ruby glowed in the winter sun.
Within the walls were a forest of high turrets, tipped with small and glinting rubies, and beneath the jeweled turrets a masonry bestiary of gargoyles, phoenixes, owls, and unicorns. Rubies encrusted the central pinnacle, which soared two hundred feet above the high walls and blinded Clovermead with its dazzling red glare. Near the pinnacle’s top a cloth-of-gold flag fluttered proudly in the breeze, emblazoned with a bee wielding a burning sword. Above the flag stood a solid sphere of milk white crystal three feet across, irregularly freckled with rubies—a map of the moon whose rubies represented Our Lady’s dark seas. Surrounding the ruby tower, twenty haughty marble figures gazed out with possessive pride at the land below.
“Those twenty statues represent the Ladies of Chandlefort,” said Sorrel. “From the time of the first Lady Cindertallow, a statue has been sculpted at each Lady Cindertallow’s inauguration. There is only room for twenty-one. There are prophecies that claim that the twenty-first ruler of Chandlefort will be the greatest of them all. There are also prophecies that she will be the last ruler of Chandlefort. Rumors whisper of further prophecies known only to the Ladies Cindertallow. Prophecies abound, some true, some false, and among silly humankind, who can tell the bramble from the grass?” Sorrel glanced sideways at Clovermead. “Have you heard of such stories in Timothy Vale?”
Clovermead shook her head. “Father never talked of Linstock, and the pilgrims never talked about that sort of prophecy. Lady Cindertallow’s heir must be awfully full of herself.”
Sorrel laughed nervously. “She has no heir. Her nobles mutter unhappily of her barrenness. Who will succeed her? The Mayor is full of hubris, we hear, and h
e boasts that he will succeed to the throne of Chandlefort. Perhaps it is even true that he swore in the Mayor’s Palace that the twenty-first statue will be of him. I have heard it said that he has already made the statue.”
“Do you think he brought it with him?” asked Clovermead.
Sorrel laughed. “I would not be surprised. That man is arrogant enough.”
The oval of bears split and extended itself to surround the castle. When it had reformed, it had become a circle around both besieged and besiegers, a half mile distant from the walls. Then the army oozed and expanded into an inner ring around Chandlefort, cautiously distant from walls and bears alike. The infantry set themselves to digging trenches, while the cavalry methodically explored every rock and canal for hidden tunnels, ambushers, and traps.
The Mayor sat on his gray mare, watched the preparations with an unblinking eye, and smiled with satisfaction when his army had finished girdling Chandlefort. He whispered some words to an aide, and soon messengers went around the camp to announce a special bonus of a shilling to every man in the army. The soldiers loudly cheered His Eminence, and cheered even more loudly when the silver actually appeared and began to be distributed.
The prison carts halted in the southern quarter of the besieging army, just west of the commissary wagons. The bear-priests ululated a triumphant chant as they came to a halt in front of the castle. They eyed the crystal moon with venom. Some fingered their knives.
“We rescue Father as soon as it’s dark,” said Clovermead as they carried feed to the oxen. “I think they’ll kill him tonight.”
“What is your plan?” asked Sorrel. “It seems impossible to me. There are too many of them and they are too watchful, too efficient. Perhaps we would be better off if we fled to the walls and asked for help from Chandlefort.”
“They won’t help Father,” Clovermead said shortly. They wouldn’t lift a finger to help a thieving ex-servant. Her heart pounded with terror and she ached to bite and feed. Her bear-tooth sang with joy. “We’ll use blood and bear-magic. Your blood and my magic.”
In the Shadow of the Bear Page 15
