The Ladies of Mandrigyn

by Barbara Hambly

  “It’s better than being passed around a bandit troop and ending up with your throat slit in a ditch.”

  “You run that risk yourself!” And when Starhawk did not answer, but only hooked her hands through the buckle of her sword belt, Fawn went on. “I swear to you, if you won’t take me with you to Grimscarp, I’ll follow you on my own.”

  The girl bent down, the winds billowing the great plaid cloak about her slender body, and picked up something Starhawk saw was a pack from among the heather at her feet. She slung it over her shoulder and descended to where the Hawk stood, catching at the branches now and then for balance, holding her dark, heavy skirts out of the brambles. Starhawk held out a hand to her to help her down to the road. The Hawk’s grip was like a man’s, firm under the delicate elbow. When they reached the road together, Fawn looked up at her, as if trying to read the expression in that craggy, inscrutable face, those transparent eyes.

  “Starhawk, I love him,” she said. “Don’t you understand what it is to love?”

  “I understand,” Starhawk said in a carefully colorless voice, “that your love for him won’t get you to Grimscarp alive. I elected to search for him because I have a little—a very little—experience with wizards and because I believe that he can be found and rescued. It could easily have been any of the men who came. I can hold my own against any of them in battle.”

  “Is that all it is to you?” Fawn demanded passionately. “Another job? Starhawk, Sun Wolf saved me from—from things so unspeakable it makes me sick to remember them. I had seen my father murdered—” Her voice caught in a way that told Starhawk that the death had been neither quick nor clean. “I’d been dragged hundreds of miles by a band of leering, dirty, cruel men, I’d seen my maid raped and murdered, and I knew that the only reason they didn’t do the same to me was because I’d fetch a better price as a virgin. But they talked about it.”

  Her face seemed to burn white in the filmy starlight, her body trembling with the hideous memories. “I was so terrified at—at being sold to a captain of a mercenary troop that I think I would have killed myself if I hadn’t been watched constantly. And then Sun Wolf bought me and he was so good to me, so kind...”

  The hood of her cloak had blown back, and the stars glinted on the tears that streaked her cheeks. Grief and compassion filled Starhawk’s heart—for that distant, frightened child and for the girl before her now. But she said, with deliberate coldness, “None of that means that you’ll be able to find him safely.”

  “I don’t want to be safe!” Fawn cried. “I want to find him—or know in my heart that he’s dead.”

  Starhawk glanced away, annoyed. She had never questioned that she should look for the Chief—her loyalty to him was such that she would have undertaken the quest no matter what Ari had said. Her own unquestioned prowess as a warrior had merely been one of the arguments. Her native honesty forced her to recognize Fawn’s iron resolution as akin to her own, regardless of what kind of nuisance she’d be on the road.

  The older woman sighed bitterly and relaxed. “I don’t suppose,” she said after a moment, “that there is any way I could prevent you from coming with me, short of tying you up and dragging you back to camp. Besides losing me time, that would only make the two of us look ridiculous.” She stared coldly down her nose when Fawn giggled at the thought. “You know, don’t you, that you might cause the troop’s departure to be delayed if Ari takes it into his head to search the town for you?”

  Fawn colored strangely under the starlight. She bent to pick up her pack again and start toward where the burro was still tethered, head-down against the wind. “Ari won’t look for me,” she said. “For one thing, you know he wouldn’t delay the march north. And besides...” Her voice faltered with shame. “I took everything valuable of mine. Clothes, jewels—everything that I would take if I were running off with another man. And that’s what he’ll think I did.”

  Unexpectedly, Starhawk grinned. Fawn might not be able to reason her way past their arguments, but she certainly had found a matter-of-fact means of discouraging pursuit. “Don’t tell me you have all that in that little pack?”

  Startled at the sudden lightening of the Hawk’s voice, Fawn looked quickly up to meet her eyes, then returned her smile ruefully. “Only the jewels. I thought we could sell them for food on the way. The rest of it I bundled up and dropped over the sea cliffs.”

  “Very nice.” Starhawk smiled approvingly, reflecting that she was evidently not the only person in the troop to hold possessions lightly. “You have a good grasp of essentials. We’ll make a trooper of you yet.”

  Chapter 4

  WHEN SUN WOLF WAS a boy, he had been stricken by a fever. He had concealed it from his father as long as he could, going hunting with the other men of the tribe in the dark, half-frozen marshes where demons flitted from tree to tree like pale slips of phosphorescent light. He had come home and hidden in the cattle loft. There his mother had found him, sobbing in silent delirium, and had insisted that they call the shaman of the tribe. It all came back to him now, with the memory of parching thirst and restless pain: the low rafters with their red and blue dragons almost hidden under the blackening of smoke; the querulous voice of that dapper, busy little charlatan with the holy bones and dangling locks of ancestral hair; and his father looming like an angry, disapproving shadow beside the reddish, pulsing glow of the hearth. The Wolf remembered his father’s growling voice. “If he can’t throw it off himself, he’d better die, then. Get your stinking smokes and your dirty bones out of here; I have goats who could work better magic than you.” He remembered the shaman’s offended sniff—because, of course, his father was right.

  And he remembered the awful agony of thirst.

  The dream changed. Cool hands touched his face and raised the rim of a cup to his lips. The metal was ice-cold, like the water in the cup. As he drank, he opened swollen eyelids to look into the face of the amber-eyed girl. The fear that widened her eyes told him he was awake.

  I tried to kill her, he thought cloudily. But she tried to kill me—or did she? His memory was unclear. Mixed with the perfume of her body, he could smell the salt flavor of the sea; the creak of wood and cordage and the shift of the bed where he lay told him he was aboard a ship. The girl’s eyes were full of fear, but her arm beneath his head was soft. She raised the cup to his cracked lips again, and he drained it. He tried to stammer thanks but could not speak—tried to ask her why she had wanted to kill him.

  Abruptly, Sun Wolf slid into sleep again.

  The dreams were worse, a terrifying nightmare of racking, helpless pain. He had a tangled vision of darkness and wind and rock, of being trapped and left prey to things he could not see, of dangling over a tossing abyss of change and loss and terrible loneliness. In the darkness, demons seemed to ring him—demons that he alone could see, as he had always been able to see them, though to others—his father, the other men of the tribe, even the shaman—they had been only vague voices and a sense of terror. Once he seemed to see, small and clear and distant, the school of Wrynde, shabby and deserted beneath the sluicing rain, with only the old warrior who looked after the place in the troop’s absence sweeping the blown leaves from the training floor with a broom of sticks. The smell and feel of the place cried to him, so real that he could almost touch the worn cedar of the pillars and hear the wailing of the wind around the rocks. Then the vision vanished in a shrieking storm of fire, and he was lost in spinning darkness that cut at him like swords, pulling him closer and closer to a vortex of silent pain.

  Then that, too, faded, and there was only white emptiness that blended slowly to exhausted waking. He lay like a hollowed shell cast up on a beach, scoured by sun and salt until there was nothing left, cold to the bone and so weary that he ached. He could not find the strength to move, but only stared at the timbers above his head, listening to the creak and roll of the ship and the slap of water against the hull, feeling the sunlight that lay in a small, heatless bar over his face.
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  They were in full ocean, he judged, and heading fast before the wind.

  He remembered the mountains of clouds, standing waiting on the horizon. If the storms hit and the ship went to pieces now, he would never have the strength to swim.

  So it would be the crabs, after all.

  But that cold, calm portion of his mind, the part that seemed always to be almost detached from his physical body, found neither strength nor anger in that thought. It didn’t matter—nothing mattered. The sway of the ship moved the chip of sunlight back and forth across his face, and he found that he lacked the strength even to wonder where he was—or care.

  An hour passed. The sunlight traveled slowly down the blanket that covered his body and lay like a pale, glittering shawl over the foot of the bunk. Like the blink of light from a sword blade, the chased gold rim of the empty cup on the table beside him gleamed faintly in the moving shadows. Footsteps descended a hatch somewhere nearby, then came down the hall.

  The door opposite his feet opened, and Sheera Galernas stepped in.

  Not the President of Kedwyr, after all, he thought, still with that eerie sense of unconcern.

  She regarded him impassively from the doorway for a moment, then stepped aside. Without a word, four women filed in behind her, dressed as she was, for traveling in dark, serviceable skirts, quilted bodices, and light boots. For a time none of them spoke, but they watched him, lined behind Sheera like acolytes behind a priestess at a rite.

  One of them was the amber-eyed girl, he saw, her delicate, curiously secretive face downcast and afraid and—what? Ashamed? Why ashamed? The rose-tinted memory of her room in Kedwyr slid through his mind, with the warmth of her scented flesh twined with his. She was clearly a professional, for all her youth...Why ashamed? But he was too tired to wonder, and the thought slipped away.

  The woman beside her was as pretty, but in a different way—certainly not professional, at least not about that. She was as tiny and fragile as a porcelain doll, her moonlight-blond hair caught in a loose knot at the back of her head, her sea-blue eyes marked at the corners with the faint lines of living and grief. He wondered what she was doing in the company of a hellcat like Sheera...in the company of any of those others, for that matter.

  Neither of the other two women had or would even make the pretense of beauty. They were both tall, the younger of them nearly Sun Wolf’s own height—a broad-shouldered, hard-muscled girl who reminded him of the women in his own troops. She was dressed like a man in leather breeches and an embroidered shirt, and her shaven skull was brown from exposure to the sun. So was her face, brown as wood and scarred from weapons, like that of a gladiator. After a moment’s thought, Sun Wolf supposed she must be one.

  The last woman stood in the shadows, having sought them with an almost unthinking instinct. The shadows did nothing to mask the fact that she was the ugliest woman Sun Wolf had ever laid eyes on—middle-aged, hook-nosed, her mouth distorted by the brown smear of a birthmark that ran like mud down onto her jutting chin. Her eyes, beneath a single black bar of brow, were as green, as cold, and as hard as jade, infused with the bitter strength of a woman who had been reviled from birth.

  They looked from him to Sheera, and on Sheera their eyes remained.

  Though he was almost too tired to speak, Sun Wolf asked after a time, “You kidnap my men, too?” There was no strength in his voice; he saw them move slightly to listen. There was a gritty note to it, too, like a streak of rust on metal, that he knew had not been there before. An effect of the poison, maybe.

  Sheera’s back stiffened slightly with the sarcasm, but she replied steadily, “No. Only you.”

  He nodded. It was a slight gesture, but all he had strength for. “You going to pay me the whole ten thousand?”

  “When you’re done, yes.”

  “Hmm.” His eyes traveled over the women again, slowly. Part of his mind was struggling against this paralyzing helplessness, screaming to him that he had to find a means to think his way out of this, but the rest of him was too tired to care. “You realize it will take me a little longer to storm the mines single-handedly?”

  That stung her, and those full red lips tightened. The porcelain doll, as if quite against her will, grinned.

  “It won’t be just you,” Sheera said, her voice low and intense. “We’re bringing you back to Mandrigyn with us as a teacher—a teacher of the arts of war. We can raise our own strike force, release the prisoners in the mines, and free the city.”

  Sun Wolf regarded her for a moment from beneath half-lowered lids, reflecting to himself that here was a fanatic if ever he saw one—crazy, dangerous, and powerful. “And just whom for starters,” he inquired wearily, “are you planning on having in your strike force, if all the men of the city are working in the mines?”

  “Us,” she said. “The ladies of Mandrigyn.”

  He sighed and closed his eyes. “Don’t be stupid.”

  “What’s stupid about it?” she lashed at him. “Evidently your precious men can’t be bothered to risk themselves, even for ready cash. We aren’t going to sit down and let Altiokis appoint the worst scoundrels in the city as his governors, to bleed us with taxes and carry off whom he pleases to forced labor in his mines and his armies. It’s our city! And even in Mandrigyn, where it’s as much as a woman’s social life is worth to go abroad in the streets unveiled and unchaperoned, there are women gladiators like Denga Rey here. In other places women can be members of city guards and of military companies. You have women in your forces yourself. Fighting women, warriors. I saw one of them in your tent that night.”

  Against the sting of her voice, he saw Starhawk and Sheera again, cool and wary as a couple of cats with the torch smoke blowing about them. Wearily, he said, “That wasn’t a woman, that was my second-in-command, one of the finest warriors I’ve ever met.”

  “She was a woman,” Sheera repeated. “And she isn’t the only woman in your forces. They said in the city that you’ve trained women to fight before this.”

  “I’ve trained warriors,” the Wolf said without opening his eyes, the exhaustion of even the effort to speak weighting him like a sickness. “If some of ’em come equipped to suckle babies later on, it’s no concern of mine, so long as they don’t get themselves pregnant while they’re training. I’m not going to train up a whole corps of them from scratch.”

  “You will,” Sheera said quietly. “You have no choice.”

  “Woman,” he told her, while that lucid and detached portion of his mind reminded him that arguing with a fanatic was about as profitable as arguing with a drunk and far more dangerous, “what I said about Altiokis still goes. I’m not going to risk getting involved in any kind of resistance in a town he’s just taken, and I sure as hell won’t do it to train a troop of skirts commanded by a female maniac like yourself. And ten thousand poxy gold pieces, or twenty thousand, or whatever the hell else you’ll offer me isn’t about to change my mind.”

  “How about your life?” the woman asked, her voice uninflected, almost disinterested. “Is that reward enough?”

  He sighed. “My life isn’t worth a plug copper at this point. If you want to chuck me overside, there’s surely no way I can stop you from doing it.”

  It was a foolish thing to have said, and he knew it, for Sheera was not a woman to be pushed and she was clearly supreme on this ship, as shown by the fact that she’d gotten its captain to put out to sea at this time of the year at all. It struck him again how absolutely alone he was here and how helpless.

  He had expected her to fly into a rage, as she had done in his tent. But she only folded her arms and tipped her head a little to one side, the glossy curls of her hair catching in the stiff embroidery of her collar. Conversationally, she said, “There was anzid in the water you drank.”

  The shock of it cut his breath like a garrote. He opened his eyes, fear like a cold sickness chilling the marrow of his bones. “I didn’t drink anything,” he said, his mouth dry as the taste of dust. He h
ad seen deaths from anzid. The worst of them had taken two days, and the victim had never ceased screaming.

  The ugly woman spoke for the first time, her low voice mellow as the notes of a rosewood flute. “You woke up thirsty from the arrow poison, after dreams of fever,” she said. “Amber Eyes gave you water to drink.” The long slender hand moved toward the empty cup beside the bed. “There was anzid in the water.”

  Horror crawled like a tarantula along his flesh. Sheera’s face was like a stone; Amber Eyes turned away, cheeks blazing with shame, unable to meet his gaze.

  “You’re lying,” he whispered, knowing that she was not.

  “You think so? Yirth has been a midwife, a Healer, and an abortionist long enough to know everything there is to know about poisons—it isn’t likely she’d have made a mistake. If you hesitate to join us out of fear of Altiokis, I can tell you now that nothing the Wizard King might do to you if our plan fails would be as bad as that death. You have nothing further to lose by obeying us now.”

  Weak as he was, he had begun to shake; he wondered how long it took for the symptoms of anzid to be felt. How long had it been since he had been given the poison? It flashed through his mind to take Sheera by that round, golden throat of hers and strangle the life out of her. But weakness held him prisoner; in any case, it would not save his life. And besides that, there was not even sense in cursing her.

  When he had been silent for a time, the woman Yirth spoke again, her cold, green eyes looking out from the concealing shadows, clinical and detached. “I am not the wizard that my master was, before Altiokis had her murdered,” she said. “But it still lies within my powers to arrest the effects of a poison from day to day by means of spells. When we reach Mandrigyn, I shall place a bounding-spell upon you, that the poison shall not lay hold of you so long as you pass a part of each night within the walls of the city. The true antidote,” she continued, with a hint of malice in that low, pure voice, “shall be given to you with your gold when you depart, after the city is freed.”