The Ladies of Mandrigyn

by Barbara Hambly

  Something moved in the semidark of the room beyond the window. For a moment, he thought it was only a chance reflection in the glass, but he saw Sheera’s head jerk to catch the motion as well. In a moment there was another flicker, bright and elusive. There was something there, something like a whirling flake of fire, drifting and eddying near the ceiling with a restless motion that was almost like life.

  Sun Wolf frowned, following it with his eyes through the protective window. Whether it was bright in itself or merely reflective of chance flames, he could not tell. It was difficult to track its motions, for it skittered here and there, almost randomly, like a housefly on a hot day or a dragonfly skimming on the warm air over the marshes; it was a single, moving point of bright flame in the murk beyond the glass.

  There was a fumbling noise in the corridor. With astonishing quickness, the door visible in the other room opened and slammed shut again behind the man who had been thrust inside—the red-haired young slave who had stood opposite Sun Wolf in the jail. The prisoner stumbled, throwing his unbound hands wide for balance; for an instant he stood in the center of the room, gaping about him, baby-blue eyes wide and staring with fear.

  The boy swung around with a startled cry.

  Like an elongating needle of light, the flake of fire—or whatever it was—struck, an instantaneous vision of incredible quickness. The young man staggered, his hands going to cover one of his eyes as if something had stung it. The next instant, his screaming could be heard through the stone and glass of the wall.

  What followed was sickening, horrifying even to a mercenary inured to all the terrible fashions in which men slew one another. The boy bent double, clutching his eye, his screams rising to a frenzied pitch. He began to run, clawing blindly, ineffectually, at his face, falling into walls. The Wolf saw the thread of blood begin to drip from between the grabbing fingers as the boy’s knees buckled. He registered, with clinical awareness, the progress of the pain by the twisting jerks of the boy’s body on the floor and by the rising agony and terror of the shrieks. Sun Wolf noted how the frantic fingers dug and picked, how the helpless limbs threshed about, and how the back writhed into an arch.

  It seemed to take forever. The boy was rolling on the floor, screaming...screaming...

  Sun Wolf could tell—he thought they all could tell—when the screams changed, when the fire—poison—insect—whatever it was—ate its way through to the brain. Something broke in the boy’s cries; a deafening, animal howl replaced the human voice. The body jerked, as if every muscle had spasmed together, and began to roll and hop around the cell in a grotesque and filthy parody of life. Glancing at Sheera, Sun Wolf saw that she had closed her eyes. Had she been able to, she would have brought up her hands to cover her ears as well. Beyond her, Derroug’s face wore a tight, satisfied smile; through his flared nostrils, his breathing dragged, as if he had drunk wine.

  Sun Wolf looked back to the window, feeling his own face, his own hands, bathed in icy sweat. If there were ever a suspicion, ever a question, about the troop, the governor had only to show the suspect what he himself had just seen. There was no doubt that person would tell everything—the Wolf knew that he would.

  The screaming continued, a gross, bestial ululation; the body was still moving, blood-splotched hands fumbling at the stones on the floor.

  Derroug’s voice was a soft, almost dreamy murmur. “So you see, my dear,” he was saying, “it is best that we ascertain, once and for all, who can—demonstrate—their loyalty to me.” And his little white hand stole around her waist. “Send your boy home.”

  “Apologize to Drypettis?” Sun Wolf paused in the act of pouring; the golden brandy slopped over the rim of the cup and onto his hand. The pine table of the potting room was pooled with red wine and amber spirits; the laden air reeked of them, heavy over the thick aromas of dirt and potting clay. His eyes were red-rimmed, bloodshot, and unnaturally steady. He had been drinking methodically and comprehensively since he had returned home that morning. It was now an hour short of sunset, and Sheera had just returned. His voice was only slightly thickened as he said, “That haughty little snirp should never have called me captain in public and she knows it.”

  Sheera’s mouth looked rather white, her lips pressed tight together, her dark hair still sticking to her cheeks with the dampness of her bath. The Wolf was half tempted to pull up a chair for her and pour her a glass—not that there was much left in any of the bottles by this time. He had never seen a woman who looked as if she needed it more.

  But Sheera said, “She says she never called you captain.”

  He stared at her, wondering if the brandy had affected his perception. “She what?”

  “She never called you captain. She told me she called out to you and told you to take a message to me, and you refused and told her you were no one’s errand boy...”

  “That’s a lie.” He straight-armed the brandy at one shot and let the glass slide from his fingers. Then rage hit him, stronger than any drink, stronger man what he had felt for Derroug while on his knees before the governor in the prison.

  “Captain,” Sheera said tightly, “Dru spoke to me just before I left the palace. She would never have called you by your title in public. She knows better than that.”

  “She may know better than that,” Sun Wolf said levelly, “but it’s possible to forget. All right. But that’s what she called me, and that’s why—”

  The controlled voice cracked suddenly. “You’re saying Dru lied to me.”

  “Yes,” the Wolf said, “that’s what I’m saying. Rather than admit that she was in the wrong.” It crossed his mind fleetingly that he should not be arguing—not drunk as he was, not this afternoon, not after the kind of scene he was fairly certain had taken place with Drypettis immediately after what amounted to rape. He could see the lines of tension digging themselves tighter and tighter into Sheera’s face, like the print of ugly memories in her tired flesh, and the sudden, uncontrollable trembling of her bruised lips. But her next words drove any thought from his mind.

  “And what would you rather do than admit you’re wrong, Captain?”

  “Not lie about one of my troops.”

  “Hah!” She had picked up a small rake, turning it nervously in fingers that shook; now she threw it back to the table with ringing violence. “Your troops! You’d have tossed her out from the start—”

  “Damned right I would,” he retorted, “and this is why.”

  “Because she was never to your taste, you mean!”

  “Woman, if you think all I’ve had to do in the last two months has been to put together a harem of assassins for myself—”

  “Rot your eyes, what else have you been doing?” she yelled back at him. “From Lady Wrinshardin to Gilden and Wilarne—”

  “Let’s not forget the ones who were assigned,” he roared, pitching his voice to drown hers. “If you’re jealous...”

  “Don’t flatter yourself!” she spat at him. “That’s what sickens you, isn’t it? You can’t stand to teach women the arts of war because those are your preserve, aren’t they? The only way you can take it is if you make them your women. They have your permission to be good so long as you’re better, and the ones who get to be the best you make damned sure will love you too much ever to beat you!”

  “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about and you sure aren’t warrior enough to know what it means!” he lashed back at her, hurling the brandy bottle at the opposite wall, so that it shattered in an explosion of alcohol and glass. “The best of the women I know is better than any man—”

  “Oh, yes,” the woman sneered furiously. “I’ve seen that best one of yours, and she looked at you the way a schoolgirl looks at her first beau! You’ve never given two cow patties together for anything about this troop! You wouldn’t care if we were all destroyed, so long as you aren’t threatened by anyone else’s excellence!”

  “You talk to me about that when you’ve been a warrior anywhere near as
long as I have—or the Hawk has!” he stormed at her. “And no, I don’t give two cow pats together for you and your stupid cause. And yes, part of it’s because of the ladies whom I don’t want to see get their throats cut in your damfool enterprise—”

  “Tarrin—”

  “I’m damned sick of hearing about pox-rotted Tarrin and your reeking cause!” he roared.

  Red with rage, she shouted over his voice, “You can’t see any higher than your own comforts—”

  He yelled back at her, “That’s what I’ve said from the beginning, rot your poxy eyes! I’d have washed my hands of the whole flaming business, and of you, too—stubborn, bullheaded hellcat that you are! I’m through with you and your damned tantrums!”

  “You’ll stay and you’ll like it!” Sheera raged. “Or you’ll die screaming your guts out a day’s journey from the wall, and that’s the only choice you’ve got, soldier! You’ll do what I tell you or Yirth may not even give you that choice!”

  She whirled in a flame-colored slash of skirts and veils and stormed from the little room, slamming the flimsy door behind her. He heard her footsteps stride into the distance, crashing hollowly, and at last heard the thunderous smash of the outer door. Through the window, he saw her stride up into the twilight of the garden toward the house, past the rocks he had settled among the bare roots of juniper, and past the dark pavilion of the bathhouse. She was sobbing, the dry, bitter weeping of rage.

  Deliberately, Sun Wolf picked up a wine bottle from the table and hurled it against the opposite wall. He did the same with the next and the next and the next—and all the others that he had consumed in the course of the day, since he had returned from seeing what it was that Derroug had hidden beneath his palace. Then he got up and made his way with a perfectly steady stride to the stables, saddled a horse, and rode out of Mandrigyn by the land gate, just as the sun was setting.

  He rode throughout the night and on into morning. The alcohol burned slowly out of his blood without lessening in him the determination to thwart Sheera, once and for all. Anzid was just about the last choice he would have taken, had he been allowed to pick his own death, but horrible death of some sort would come to him for certain if he remained in Mandrigyn. Today he had seen at least one that was worse than anzid. And in any case, he would die his own man, not Sheera’s slave.

  He turned the horse’s head toward the west, traversing in darkness the half-flooded fields, spiky with sedge and with the bare branches of naked trees. Before midnight, he reached the crossroads where the way ran up to the Iron Pass and the greater bulk of the Tchard Mountains and out over the uplands to pass through the rocks of the Stren Water Valley down to the rich Bight Coast. It had been in his mind to ride north up the pass, knowing that Sheera would never think to seek him on Altiokis’ very doorstep. And seek him she would, of that he was certain. She would never endure this last defiance from him. He had vowed that he would not give her the satisfaction of ever finding his body, of ever knowing for certain that he was dead.

  Besides, if she found him before the anzid killed him, it might be possible for her to bring him back.

  But in the end, he could not take the Citadel road. He turned the mare’s head westward where the roads crossed and spurred on through the dripping silence of the dark woods.

  He wondered if the Hawk would understand what he was doing.

  Ari, he knew, would have apologized to Drypettis with every evidence of sincerity and a mental vow to take it out of that pinch-faced little vixen later. And the Hawk...The Hawk would have told them at the outset that she would die and be damned to them—or else have found a way to avoid the entire situation.

  What had Sheera meant about the way the Hawk had looked at him? Was it simply Sheera’s jealousy or her hate? Or did she, as a woman, see things with a woman’s different eyes.

  He didn’t think so, much as he would have liked to believe that Starhawk had looked at him with something other than that calm, businesslike gaze. In his experience, love had always meant demands—on the time, on the soul, and certainly on the attention. Starhawk had never asked him for anything except instruction in their chosen craft of war and an occasional daffodil bulb for her own garden.

  It was Starhawk, in fact, who had defined for him why love was death to the professional, on one of those long winter evenings in Wrynde when Fawn had gone to sleep, her head on his lap, her curls spilling over his thigh. He and the Hawk had sat up talking, half drunk before the white sand of the sunken hearth, listening to the rain drumming on the cypresses of the gardens outside. It was he who had spoken of love, who had quoted his father’s maxim: Don’t fall in love and don’t mess with magic. Love was a crack in a man’s armor, he had said. But the Hawk, with her clearer insight, had said that love simply caused one to cease being single-minded. For a warrior, to look aside from the main goal of survival could mean death. He could not love, if his goal was to survive at all costs.

  Could a woman who loved speak of love with such clear-eyed brutality?

  Could a woman who didn’t?

  Dawn came, slow and gray through the wooded hills. Yellow leaves muffled the road in soaked carpets; overhanging branches splattered and dripped on the Wolf’s back. He rode more slowly now, scouting as he went, taking his bearings on the crowding hills visible above the bare trees. South of the road, those hills shouldered close, massive and lumpy, stitched with narrow ravines and a rising network of ledges, half choked in scrub and wild grape. Here and there, he heard the frothing voices of swollen streams, booming among the rocks.

  Wind flicked his long hair back over his shoulders and laid a cold hand on his cheek. He had forgotten how good it felt to be alone and free, even if only free to die.

  It was midafternoon when he let the horse go. He sent it on its way along the westward road with a slap on the rump, and it trotted off gamely, leaving tracks that Sheera was sure to follow. With any luck, she’d trail it quite a distance and never find his body at all. It would rot that hellcat’s soul, he thought with a grim inward smile, to think that he might, by some miracle, have eluded her—to think that, somewhere in the world, he might still be alive and laughing.

  He was already beginning to feel the anzid working in his veins, like the early stirrings of fever. He struck back through the woods in an oblique course toward the rocks of the higher hills and the caves that he knew lay in the direction of Mandrigyn. It was a long way, and he went cautiously, covering his tracks, wading in the freezing scour of the streams, and finding his way over the rocky ground by instinct when the daylight faded again into evening.

  He had always had sharper senses in the dark than most men; he had had that ability as a child, he remembered, and it had been almost uncanny. Even in the cloud-covered darkness and rising wind, he made out the vague shapes of the trees, the ghostly birches and leering, gargoyle oaks. His nose told him it would rain later, destroying his tracks; wind was already tugging at his clothes.

  The ground underfoot grew steep and stony, rising sharply and broken by the outcropped bones of the earth. He found that his breath had begun to saw at his lungs and throat, a cold sharpness, as if broken glass were lodged somewhere inside. Still the ground steepened, and the foliage thinned around him; vague rock shapes became visible above, rimmed with a milky half-light that only the utter darkness of the rest of the night let him see at all. Weakness pulled at him and a kind of feverish pain that had no single location; nausea had begun to cramp his stomach like chewing pincers.

  The first wave of it hit him in the high, windy darkness of a broken hillside, doubling him over, as if a drench of acid had been spilled through his guts. The shock of it took his breath away and, when the pain faded, left him weak and shaking, feeling sickened and queerly vulnerable. After a time, he got to his feet, hardly daring to move for fear the red agony would return. Even as he staggered on, he felt it lying in wait for him, lurking behind every fiber of his muscles.

  It took him another hour to find the kind of p
lace that he sought. He had been looking for a cave deep in the hills, so far from the road that, no matter how loudly he screamed, no searchers would hear. What he found was a ruined building, a sort of chapel whose broken walls were wreathed and hung with curtains of winter-brown vines. In the crypt below it was a pit, some twenty feet deep and circular, ten or fifteen feet across. Thrown pebbles clinked solidly or rustled in weeds; the little light that filtered through the blowing branches above him showed him nothing stirring but wind-tossed heather.

  By now he was sweating, his hands trembling, a growing pain in his body punctuated by lightning bolts of cramps. Cautiously, he hung by his hands over the edge, then let himself drop.

  It was a mistake. It was as if his entire body had been flayed apart; the slightest shock or jar pierced him like tearing splinters of wood. The sickening intensity of the pain made him vomit, and the retching brought with it new pains, which in turn fed others. Like the first cracking of a sea wall, each new agony lessened his resistance to those mounting behind it, until they ripped his flesh and his mind as a volcano would rip the rock that sealed it. Dimly, he wondered how he could still be conscious, or if the agony would go on like this until he died.

  It was only the beginning of an endless night.

  Sheera found him in the pit, long after the dawn that barely lightened the blackness of the rainsqualls of the night. Wind tore at her wet riding skirts as she stood looking down from the pit’s edge and snagged at the dripping coils of her hair. Though it was his screaming which had drawn her, his voice had cracked and failed. Through the rain that slashed her eyes, she could see him still moving, crawling feverishly through the gross filth that smeared every inch of the pit’s floor, groaning brokenly but unable to rest.