According to Ari they had been trapped here on the bank of the Gore for the last six days.
"The storms in the mountains have got to let up sometime." Ari sipped at his liquor with a tentativeness Starhawk readily understood after an experimental taste of her own cup. "The river rises and falls. It slacked yesterday enough to try a crossing, though it was still higher than I've ever seen it. Zane tried going across with a rope to haul rafts. He turned back. There's seven feet of water over the highest of the midstream rocks and it's going like an avalanche. We've even been thinking about crossing back over the Khivas and heading south again ... "
"Don't," the Wolf said, and moved his heavy shoulders against the mildewing canvas back of his camp chair. Beyond the dividing curtain, Starhawk could hear Raven Girl moving quietly about on the creaking bits of planking set up over the general muck. "The Khivas slacked off a little, too, or the Hawk and I couldn't have gotten across at all, but it was rising already when we were doing it. It'll be a millrace now. I don't think you could have taken wagons over it, even at its lowest."
"Pox." Ari sat quiet for a moment, staring down into his cup, wet, dark hair falling forward around his haggard face. Above the drumming of the rain and the rush of the river, Starhawk could hear quite clearly the voices in the other tents packed so closely around this one-voices arguing tiredly, and somewhere a woman crying with the bitter, jagged weariness of one who has been weeping on and off for days. It made her feel stifled and irrationally angry, wanting to strike out at random. By the smell, the latrines were far too close to the tents, which were themselves jammed together, a higgledy-piggledy mass of canvas and rope, wagons and mule lines on the pebbly hillock, with the river foaming greedily at their feet.
She asked, "Who're the others in the camp?"
Ari shrugged. "About two hundred of Krayth's boys joined us. They said it was too far back to Kilpithie. I don't know whether these were the ones who mutinied or who were just sick of the whole thing. Their leader's a man named Louth."
"I know him." Sun Wolf grunted, setting aside his untasted cup after one sniff. "And if he's leading them, I'd bet money these were the mutineers."
Ari said nothing for a moment, but nodded to himself, as if adding this piece of information to others in his mind, and the lines in his face seemed to settle in a little deeper in the dim flicker of the ridgepole lamps. The Wolf had told her Ari looked bad, but Starhawk was shocked to see how her friend had aged. He'd lost flesh, and there was a tautness to him now, the feverish look of a man living on his nerves. He went on, "There's singletons and little groups with us, too, some of them from the siege, some of them just freebooters, bandits. Good men, some of them. They don't make trouble."
"Doesn't mean they couldn't." Sun Wolf's tawny eye glinted feral in the candlelight.
"Doesn't mean they will, either," Ari replied, running one hand over his unshaven face. "And if the river falls back enough to use rafts we're going to need all the help on this we can get."
"You still talking rafts?" a voice demanded from the tent doorway. Looking up, Starhawk saw Zane framed against the darkness, all his modish yellow puffs and slashes oozing rainwater like a drowned cock pheasant. "Give it up, Ari, that river's not coming down till spring. There isn't enough timber in this whole camp to float everything over, if it did."
"Not all at once, no," Ari replied quietly. "But there's enough wagons to run a ferry, if people like your pal Sugarman give them up." From the cant name and the bite of contempt and loathing in Ari's voice-and from her earlier acquaintance with Zane-Starhawk guessed that Sugarman must be one of the dream-sugar dealers who were as much a fixture in the train of the mercenary armies as were pimps. Two or three of them had luxurious winter residences in the town of Wrynde, at a discreet distance from Sun Wolf's camp. The Wolf, though holding them in considerable scorn, had never been fool enough to tell his men what they could and could not do on their own time, but most of the troop knew better than to come to his sessions on weapons training or go into battle under the influence of either drugs or the various sorts of alcohol peddled by the army's hangers-on. Those who didn't learned otherwise very quickly, or else ceased to be an issue.
"He's no pal of mine," Zane hastened to say. "But you'd be asking for trouble to try and take his wagon from him. He's got his own hired boys to guard him." With a gesture curiously boyish he flipped his wet curls back from his eyes. "Face it, pal, we're stuck, and the smartest thing we can do is to go with what we got."
"No," said Ari, with a dogged quiet that echoed a dozen prior discussions.
Zane turned to Sun Wolf. "What about the Gore Thane's fort upriver?" he asked bluntly. "I've been trying to tell this grut for days that we're stuck and we're running out of food sitting here in the rain, when the Gore Thane has got a good fort, good defensive position, and a winter's worth of food and women holed up five miles from here ... "
" ... on the side of a cliff," Ari pointed out, "that we'd lose a third to a half of our men trying to take in the rain."
"Maybe we would have," Zane said, his blue eyes sparkling. "But now we've got an edge. We've got a hoodoo on our side ... " He grinned at Sun Wolf. "Don't we, Wolf?"
Starhawk cringed inside at the arrogant brightness of his voice. In the fretted lamplight she could almost see Sun Wolf's hair bristle. "No," the Wolf said softly, "you don't. And that 'grut' is your commanding officer."
"Aah, come on, Wolf, we're up against it, we don't have time for that kind of candy-mouthed hairsplitting now!" Zane protested, though Starhawk saw his glance shift. "We're all friends, we've all drunk out of the same bottle and puked in the same ditch ... "
"That doesn't make you commander of this troop," Ari said quietly. He didn't rise from the staghorn chair, but Starhawk wouldn't have wanted him to be watching her that way.
"Wolf ... " Zane turned to Sun Wolf again, and met only a stony yellow gaze.
"And it doesn't make him commander, " Ari gritted, the harshness of his voice dragging Zane's attention back to him as if Ari had taken him by the hair. "He gave it up and walked away from it. It's mine, now, and I'll tear the face off any man who tries to take it from me. All right?" His brown eyes were hard, drilling into Zane's. "All right?"
"Yeah, yeah, all right," the lieutenant agreed, but there was an ugly flare to his cupid-bow lips. Starhawk saw him sip in his breath to make another remark-at a guess, she thought, something along the lines of Pardon me for letting my humble shadow fall across your path, your Majesty, but wisdom or caution-rare indeed for Zane-intervened, and he turned and strode from the tent, every line of his back and the swirl of his crimson cloak insolent, as if he had spat upon the threshold.
"Aaah, hell, Hawk, I wasn't trying to undermine his goddam authority!" Zane took a long pull on his tankard-White Death containing, by the smell of it, far less water than her own. Evidently the beer had blown up several days ago as well. "I trained with him, dammit! I've fought beside him. I've saved his goddam life, if you want to get technical about it! And then to have him come off with this 'It's my troop so don't ask questions ... ' "He made a gesture of impatience and disgust, with only a little stiffness, a little mistiming, giving away that it had been calculated and rehearsed.
But then, thought the Hawk, she had never quite figured out how much of Zane's speech and behavior was ever spontaneous.
She had tracked him down in Bron's tavern, whose dozen or so lamps shining through the stained calico linings of its canvas walls turned it, from the outside, into a dim ruby box. Inside, the air was clouded with smoke, the ground underfoot, the benches, the few crude tables, and the plank bar wet, the reek of the unwashed bodies and unwashed clothing of the hundred or so men and women packed shoulder-to-steaming-shoulder unbelievable. Fastidious herself, Starhawk had long grown used to the stench of soldiers on campaign, but this surpassed most of her previous experience.
It was also noisy, and there was a quality to the sound, a belligerent edge, that made her hackles lift and
caused her to be uneasily conscious of how far she sat from the door. Usually Bron opened out the sides of the tent, the tables spilling over into the outside under an assortment of makeshift marquees and awnings. Crowded together like this, Starhawk felt again her nervous loathing of crowds, the irrational desire to find the nearest sword and start hacking, and guessed she wasn't the only one in the room prey to those sentiments. In the overraucous voices of the soldiers, the shrill, petulant whines of the whores, she sensed the pulse of helplessness and frustrated rage that only looked for an outlet into armed violence. At the cardtables nearby she glimpsed some of her friends-Dogbreath, Firecat, Battlesow, the Goddess, Hog with the notorious Helmpiddle panting happily at his feet. Nobody seemed to be winning much, but they were all taking it worse than usual. Even Bron, pouring gin at the plank bar, seemed sullen and nervous. As Sun Wolf had warned her, the bard-gap-toothed, unshaven, and clearly drunk already-was comprehensively awful.
"Come on, Zane," she said placatingly, "you know you can't decide things by committee in battle."
"We're not in a goddam battle."
"No." Starhawk turned the wooden cup in her hands. It hadn't been washed. Bron, like everyone else, must be reaching the stage of weariness where nothing mattered very much. "But we're in worse danger than any battle I've ever seen. If that river rises much more we're going to be wading."
"That's just what I'm saying!" he protested angrily, and refilled his cup from the leather pitcher he'd brought over from the bar. "We can take that fort! Hell, it's only a bunch of shepherds, some Mother-worshiping farmers and a two-bit thane ... "
"Who'll be fighting for their lives, on territory they know," she pointed out. "In the pouring-down rain."
"Rot the rain! We can still take it! Dammit, Hawk, is Ari's damn chicken-heartedness catching? You're the Wolf's main jig these days-can't you talk him into lending us a hand with it?"
"Probably not." The rest of the remark she let pass, having learned long ago that taking issue with Zane's attitudes would only lead to arguments as time-consuming as they were pointless.
He made a face. Across the room, the bard had mercifully finished-Penpusher had evidently bought him several drinks as payment for doing so-and was now helping Bron move benches back and toss down extra bits of timber and canvas on the soggy ground. Starhawk saw a woman coming forward, a dancer, shedding back the rain-flecked sheet of oiled black silk that had protected her crimson dress and the raven masses of her hair from the damp. After a quick glance at the mirror she wore at her belt the woman stooped a little, and with a gesture incredibly intimate, incredibly graceful, raised one foot to take off her shoes. From the poker game Dogbreath yelled, "You need help with that, Opium?"
"Not from you, Puppylove," she smiled sweetly, the gold bells of her earrings clinking as she straightened. "You give 'em back all sticky."
Penpusher tuned a mandolin, which also seemed to have been affected by the curse, and the woman Opium stretched like a cat, as if settling bone, muscle, and flesh into easiness. She began to dance.
"Yeah," Zane said bitterly, but he wasn't looking at Starhawk now; his eyes were following the woman in red. "He managed not to be there when we went into Vorsal, didn't he?" A sourness tightened his expression, different from his pets and pouts and rages of former days. The hot light in his eyes as he watched the dancer was like fever. "What the hell's got into him these days, Hawk? He's not the man he was."
"No," she replied, quite calmly, knowing that in one sense the statement was absolutely factual, though not the sense in which Zane spoke. "And he wasn't there at Vorsal because he was taking care of me."
That broke into his hostile silence. He glanced back at her, with a look of comical apology, and for a moment he was the man she had known. "See the Amazing Foot Swallower in Action." He grinned and patted her hand. "But still, he could have ... I don't know. Two years ago he'd have figured out some way to save you and be there for us."
Starhawk said nothing. She wasn't about to argue over events during which she'd been unconscious, but she was familiar enough with Zane's view of the world to know that the man habitually spoke without facts or evidence, only from his wishes, and his instinctive knowledge of what would sting. Ten years ago Sun Wolf might have tried to do two things of the sort in too short a time, but she was willing to bet that one, or perhaps both, would have failed.
Instead she said, "You made it through Vorsal, didn't you?"
He made a dismissive sputter, his gaze locked on the dancer again, his lips half-parted under the golden mustache which, like many of Sun Wolf's inner circle, he had grown in imitation of his Chief. He wasn't the only one staring as if he'd never seen a bosom in his life, either. The dancer was good, moving easily within herself, sensual rather than lewd as she flirted with her gold-embroidered veil. Across the room even Curly Bear, a notorious fancier of boys, was watching; the two or three bravos guarding the dry little man Starhawk guessed must be this year's camp drug dealer, Sugarman, were frankly admiring, and even Sugarman himself had quit counting his money and his little paper screws of powder. Beside her, the Hawk could hear Zane's breathing quicken and sensed anger as well as the sexual tension rising from him, almost as visible as the faint curl of steam that drifted from his red cloak and brass-studded daffodil sleeves as the heat of the room dried them.
When the woman finished and gathered the copper and silver bits thrown to her, Zane rose, pushing his way through the crowd toward the doorway, with scarcely a good-by to the Hawk, who remained, moodily turning her barely touched cup in her hands, thinking about that handsome and arrogant young man.
She'd known him for three years, fought training matches against him, her skills sharpened out of desperate necessity because he was one of those men who felt his manhood threatened by a woman bearing arms. Off the training floor, he was an amiable companion, generous in buying drinks and scrupulous in his treatment of her, though she had never decided whether this was from genuine respect, fear, or some angle in a game of his own. Once when they were both very drunk he'd asked her to join him in bed, something she hadn't the slightest desire to do; she'd laughed it off and the matter had passed. An excellent fighter, he'd risen fast to squad-leader and she'd guessed he'd take her place as lieutenant when Ari took over the troop.
But she'd never quite trusted him.
Across the room, furious voices rose. Her head came up sharply at the sound. A clumsy-looking, pasty-faced man whom she didn't recognize-one of Krayth's old troop?-was waving a helmet under Hog's nose and yelling. A moment later he drew a knife and reached down to where Helmpiddle lurked guiltily behind his master's legs. This proved to be a mistake. Hog shoved him back, rising to his full six-foot-three of burly black fur ...
Starhawk got to her feet and began to slip through the crowds for the door.
She didn't make it. There was a bellowed oath in the crowd behind her, the sound of boards breaking, and a whore's scream. Then, like milk too long on the fire, the whole room suddenly erupted into a boiling froth of violence.
Starhawk swore, ducked a bench one of the dice players swung at Dogbreath's head, and sprang back to avoid a locked pair of combatants who came tumbling over the top of the crowd at her like mating cats rolling off a roof. A thrown tankard thwacked her between the shoulder blades, the hard-boiled leather bouncing harmlessly off her sheepskin doublet but dousing her in a rain of White Death; Dogbreath's erstwhile assailant nearly fell on top of her, with Firecat locked onto his back, all her jeweled bracelets flashing, screaming oaths and pounding his head with her doubled fists. Up near the bar, the bard had begun to sing again, a smile of inebriated delight on his gap-toothed mouth, off-key voice skirling into a song of battle while he thumped a foot on Opium's makeshift dance floor half a measure out of time.
The noise was incredible. Someone slugged at her, a punch she slipped more from instinct than from thought and returned as hard as she could with a knee in her unknown assailant's groin. The man doubled up with a gr
unt. His buddy-such men always had buddies-took a swing at her with an incoherent shout, and she smashed his fist aside and elbowed him, hooked his foot, and dumped him down on top of his friend with an efficiency born of a desire to get out of the situation fast. Then she dived for the door, only to be blocked by a struggling mass of warriors-one or two women, but mostly men, many of them soaking wet from the outside, who had come on the run, drawn by the noise of the fracas.
She got a peripheral glimpse of three of the camp followers crowding up behind the minimal protection of the up-tipped bar; of Bron grabbing the lamps as Penpusher and a woman named Nails, who was easily as big as he, locked in mortal combat, slammed into the tent pole, making the whole structure shudder; of Sugarman backed into a corner while his hired thugs struggled with what Starhawk could only assume were dissatisfied customers, stuffing his moneybags and little packets of dreamsugar into the front of his robe. Rot this, she thought, and flicked from her boot one of the knives she kept there in defiance of Bron's primary rule about weapons check. The place'll be in flames in two minutes, and I for one don't want to stay for the barbecue.
She cut a neat slit in the calico lining of the wall nearest her, sliced the canvas underneath, and slipped out just as another jarring wallop to one of the tent poles dumped several gallons of collected rainwater down onto her head.
At least it washed off the gin. Her boots squishing in the mud, she picked her way over tent ropes and around shelters, the rain pouring over her like a river. There was, of course, no question of going back for her cloak. On her way through the tight-packed maze she passed Helmpiddle, the cause of it all, sniffing interestedly at someone's armor, propped up to air in the shelter of a marquee. It was not, she suspected, going to be anyone's night.
Nor was it. Edging sidelong between two pavilions and ducking yet another guy rope, she heard a woman's voice raised in anger and a man's vicious whisper, which she recognized as Zane's. She hesitated, aware that it was none of her business. Between the tents, she could see what might be two figures struggling in the shelter of someone's dilapidated marquee. The night was pitch black, but a sliver of lamplight from a nearby tent caught the streaming sparkle of the rain, the glint of the woman's jeweled plastron, and the gold of Zane's long, curly hair. Above the drumming roar of water of tent hides, she caught his voice. "You're damn choosy for a slave whore ... "
Hambly, Barbara - Sun Wolf 3 - Dark hand of magic.txt Page 19
