The women and the warlords coaaod-3

by Hugh Cook

  Now, the two women slept huddled together for warmth, their bodies making one mound of softly breathing wool and fur, a single blanket sheltering the two of them. The Melski slept apart. Hor-hor-hurulg-murg needed no body-warmth to make himself comfortable; his body was supremely adapted to the slush and wet, and, though adult Melski were accustomed to sleeping in the air, he could have got a reasonable night's sleep curled up in a hole in the bottom of a lake or a river.

  All three of them, captive creatures in danger of their lives, were exhausted; they did not wake when the flames of the castle moat roared up, making the ground reverberate and shake; they slept on, dreaming, till morning came.

  ***

  At dawn, a report came from Castle Vaunting by means of signal flags. Casualties were heavy; Pukegoh Novdoy was dead. The enemy had repulsed all attacks on the gatehouse keep, but the Collosnon commanded the battlements. No fire, lightning or other magic had been used for hours; the strength of the defending wizards must be exhausted.

  Lord Alagrace sent back a question:

  'Water?’

  The reply came back:

  'Rain pools. Small. Enough one day.’

  Lord Alagrace conferred with siege marshals. They could build a bamboo tower beside the moat, rig chains between the tower and the battlements, and send food and water to their men by means of a flying fox arrangement. But that would take days.

  Lord Alagrace ordered the survivors of the first wave to rest, tend their wounded, eat, sleep, then launch a further assault on the gatehouse keep in the afternoon.

  From intelligence Haveros had provided, Lord Alagrace knew he still had enough men on the battlements to have a reasonable chance of defeating the enemy absolutely by this all-out assault. If that failed, either his siege marshals would have to find some way of sending reinforcements to the battlements immediately, or some way would have to be found to reopen negotiations with the enemy.

  And if that failed, Lord Alagrace could still starve out Castle Vaunting by siege. He might lose all the men of the first wave, but victory would still be his. In the end. But now… he was bone-weary, having been awake all night. Lord Alagrace retired to his tent, leaving orders for his guards to wake him if any fighting started.

  Haveros made his own plans. When fighting started again, all eyes would be turned on the castle. Yen Olass took his message to the Princess Quenerain: he would come to her in the afternoon, once fighting started on the battlements. Yen Olass would stand guard while they obtained their satisfaction.

  They had waited long enough.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  While the struggle for control of the battlements proceeded, two members of the besieging army seized the opportunity to indulge in some close-quarter tactics of their own. Haveros and the Princess Quenerain had been apart for too long; now, at last, they were together, secluded within the tent set aside for the princess to prepare herself for the Rite of Purification. Nobody would disturb them while the battle raged: nobody would even think of them.

  The Princess Quenerain shed her clothing. Haveros stripped naked, and clutched her perfume. She shuddered, panted, gripped him with claws, receiving him into her body.

  And then-

  The world slurred. He clutched air and held it. 'Cluth?' she said. 'Nabeek

  Her eyes widened to peacock iridescence. Light danced across her body. Her breasts enveloping. And then:

  The world snapped into hard focus. They gasped for breath, as if they had been swimming underwater.

  'What happened?' said the Princess Quenerain, her voice a whisper, terrified.

  'Madness. From…’

  From what cause? He touched her, lightly, to comfort her fears. And touched her. And touched her. Grease beneath his fingers. Roast meat. He closed, bit. She wrestled him. They lurched, fell. Laughing – her laughter ripped from her lungs like a scream – she fled from the tent. He caught her just outside, and they went down together and-

  Realized what they were doing.

  She was bleeding. He had bitten her neck, hard, drawing blood. Armed men staggered across the ground, as if driven by heavy wind. One steadied himself, and stared at the naked lovers. He had bitten through his lower lip.

  Someone was screaming.

  Haveros scrabbled up handfuls of dead grass and mud, plastering it against his nakedness in a vain effort to hide his shame. The Princess Quenerain flinched from the hate in the eyes of the soldiers. Her hands, like damaged butterflies, fluttered at her face. She wanted to see, yet she wanted to hide her face from the world which was about to say-

  'Dralkosh!' shouted a soldier. 'No!' bellowed Haveros.

  A spear-butt took him from behind, beat him to the ground. As though it was her they were pounding, the Princess Quenerain sank to her knees in the mud. Shuddering. Other soldiers were taking up the cry of 'dralkosh', but one, standing quite near, said in a low and level voice:

  'Woman, have you no shame?’

  The voice was real. The cold mud was real. And her body – naked in public view. This was not a dream. The Princess Quenerain clutched her hands to her places, knowing that the gesture was futile, since if this was not a dream then she was most certainly dead – or as good or dead.

  Out of the corner of her eye, the Princess Quenerain noticed a figure in a battered fur coat skulking away, trying to look inconspicuous. It was Yen Olass Ampadara, who had been standing guard outside the tent. She almost made it – then someone saw who it was, and raised the alarm. Yen Olass tried to sprint away. A man stuck the butt of a spear between her legs. Down she went, face first into the mud. The man leapt onto her back, grabbed her hair and yanked it back. To cut her throat? No: all he did was scream;

  'Dralkosh!’

  'This,' croaked Haveros, trying to rise, 'has gone too far.’

  Then someone hit him on the head, and he was knocked unconscious.

  ^ % sfc

  Lord Alagrace did his best. He quailed at the thought of returning to Tameran and telling the Lord Emperor Khmar that his daughter Quenerain had been stoned to death in the imperial province of Estar.

  However, there was little Lord Alagrace could do.

  The facts spoke for themselves. The survivors of the first wave had been fighting the enemy on the battlements, when a sudden spasm of communal madness had broken the impetus of the battle. That madness had swept through the entire Collosnon army, causing men to shout or throw themselves to the ground, to attack each other, to mutilate themselves with weapons, to step into the flames of the castle moat or cower down to the ground, terrified of the weight of the sky.

  And the madness had caused the lovers Haveros and Quenerain to reveal themselves.

  Lord Alagrace blamed wizards, but his soldiers had never seen wizards. They believed in them, certainly – after the evidence of the blazing flames of the castle moat and the lightning used against their comrades on the battlements, they could hardly disbelieve. But the figure of the dralkosh was much more familiar.

  If a man was impotent with a woman, that was evidence to suggest she was a dralkosh. If her children were born deformed, or the wrong sex, or dead, or were not born at all, that too meant she could be a dralkosh. If there was flood or famine or plague or a man went mad or a dog turned rabid, someone must be to blame, and often it turned out that a dralkosh was at the root of all the trouble.

  Now the army had two dubious women in its ranks. One was the Princess Quenerain, who had already once been the centre of a scandal. The princess, supposedly so pure, so virginal – yet now discovered to have been fornicating with Haveros while a battle was on. Fornicating, while another woman stood guard: Yen Olass Ampadara, known to be an oracle, known to possess occult powers, known to tell fortunes and read the future, known to be a brash and wilful woman, known to have used sorcery to help her disable General Chonjara when she humiliated him in front of the army.

  Something had gone seriously wrong: madness had attacked the whole army. Someone had to be blamed: a cloven of shameles
s dralkosh, their unclean bodies urging and gaplax. They stood condemned.

  True, there were dangers in stoning the emperor's daughter to death. However, battering women to pulp was, in the Collosnon Empire, the traditional way of working off public and private frustrations. Here the frustrations were great, for the army was stalled in this deadwater province, stalled outside a strategic castle which they had to take, with fire preventing them from reaching their enemies and tearing them apart. Khmar was far away, and known to be dying. The Princess Quenerain was close at hand, and she, tall, proud and beautiful, was a perfect victim.

  That made two.

  And Haveros made a third.

  Stoning a man to death was unusual. But Haveros was known to have sinned with the princess before. Not everyone believed the story that Khmar had sent him to Estar: some thought him a genuine traitor. And the whole army was offended at a senior commander indulging himself in sexual pleasures while their comrades fought and died on the battlements of Castle Vaunting. Out of hate, superstition, jealousy, and, in some cases, a genuine desire for justice, they decided that he would be stoned to death with the women.

  All things being equal, their commanders would have 182

  talked them out of it. However, all things were not equal. Chonjara dearly wanted to see Haveros dead. Chonjara remembered his father dying of a heart attack in the Enskandalon Square in Gendormargensis; before he expired, the old man had begged his son to come and help him. Thanks to the old combat rule invoked by Haveros, Chonjara had been unable to take a single step toward him. Chonjara wanted Haveros dead, and Chonjara's lobby was a powerful one.

  Lord Alagrace saw only one way to save any of the three. Remembering how he had saved Haveros in Gendormargensis by getting a dralkosh to claim responsibility, he went and spoke to Yen Olass Ampadara:

  'Admit your guilt. Admit that you're the one to blame. Say you bewitched the others. Say you dreamed their dreams for them. Say it's your fault.’

  'But it's not,' said Yen Olass.

  Unlike the dralkosh in Gendormargensis, Yen Olass had no child for Lord Alagrace to hold to ransom.

  'I'm asking you to do this because I saved your life on the Yangrit Highway.’

  'Saved my life!’

  'You were a runaway slave, yet I spared you.’

  'Tratz! I saved my life! In front of Khmar, I spoke for my life. Now you want me to save your life as well. That's not how it works. It's for you to save us, all of us, not for us to save you.’

  'I'm not asking you to save me, I'm asking-’

  'You want me to save Quenerain to stop Khmar skinning you alive. I want to save me! I want to live! I'm Yen Olass Ampadara, I have my own life, I'm me, I want to live. And Khmar will-’

  'You must realize-’

  'I must realize that I can't be there to see it, but that won't stop it happening. I hope he starts with your testicles.’

  After a long and very distressing interview in Lord Alagrace's private sleeping tent – Yen Olass painted such a vivid picture of Khmar pulling his toenails out and biting his testicles off that Alagrace began to wonder if she really was a dralkosh – Yen Olass was taken back to the other prisoners.

  And Lord Alagrace…

  … did nothing.

  Because it had already occurred to him that, since Chonjara had been able to secure a death sentence for Haveros, he might be able to do the same for Lord Alagrace, who was generally known to have had a long association with the oracle Yen Olass Ampadara.

  The three prisoners were kept in a tent through the dying hours of the day and all through the night. They were not tied up, but there was no chance of escape: the tent was ringed with campfires and an ever-changing audience of men, talking, drinking, gambling. This time, there was no talk of rape, because now there was genuine fear mixed with the hatred; by the time the men had shared the true stories, the gossip and the rumours, there were few who believed the condemned women to be safe to touch.

  For his part, Lord Alagrace became convinced that Yen Olass had used sorcery against him, because he woke in the night after enduring terrifying dreams of desexing and torture. He woke just in time to strangle a scream in his throat; for a few moments he was convinced that the Lord Emperor Khmar was actually in his tent.

  Truth to tell, Yen Olass had done her very best to slip suggestions into his mind. She had succeeded in giving him nightmares, but had failed to compel him to action. When they had confronted each other, both had been very angry and, in their separate ways, very frightened; Lord Alagrace, all his energies mobilized for argument, had been a poor subject for skills of mind control which work best when the subject is relaxed, unsuspecting and concentrating on something else. Yen Olass, her skill rising briefly to genius, had planted suggestions which now conjured up the very shadow of the Lord Emperor Khmar in Lord Alagrace's tent. But Khmar was far, far away; Chonjara and the army were very close…

  ***

  Morning came.

  Signals came from the battlements: no food, running out of water, heavy casualities, our wounded are suffering.

  Nothing could be done to help.

  The mood of the army was grim, cold, hostile. The three condemned prisoners were hustled down to the Hollern River and pushed into the shallows just upstream of the bridge. Men lined both banks and the bridge itself. Those who had gambled for the privilege of casting the first stones chose their rocks.

  Yen Olass Ampadara, her eyes red with crying, stood ankle-deep in the water. She looked around for Karahaj Nan Nulador, her only hope. She did not see him. And in any case, what could he have done? Nothing. She was wearing wool under her league rider's weather jacket and her mud-stained fur coat, but she was shivering. Why? Because she was tired, she was hungry – how ridiculous to be hungry at a time like this – and she was frightened.

  They were really going to do it.

  They were really going to throw stones at her and smash her face and smash her fingers and smash her and smash her till she fell down into the cold ugly water which was hungering into her boots, and they would carry on smashing her and smashing her till she was an ugly raggage of dead fur and naked bones gulleting away down the river to the cold claws of the sea.

  She wanted someone to come and hold her and help her, but there was nobody. And Haveros and Quenerain both stood like statues, as cold and silent as stone. Both looked as if they were only waiting to die, they accepted it, how could that be?

  The first man threw the first stone.

  It hit Haveros on the side of the head. He grunted, and folded up. Dead? No. He steadied himself, managed to hold himself steady in a crouch, arse in the water, one hand thrusting down to seek for balance.

  The second man threw the second stone.

  It caught Quenerain a glancing blow on the side of the head. She grimaced slightly, turning her head to one side. Blood ran down her cheek. She was going to die like an aristocrat.

  The third man threw the third stone.

  It came flying through the air and hit Yen Olass on the shin. The pain was agonizing. She screamed. Snatching rock from water, she hurled her strength against them.

  She screamed:

  'You smegma-eating arsefuckers!’

  She threw another rock. Saw a man go down. Screamed:

  'Goatsucking shiteaters!’

  Everywhere men were muscling forward, picking up rocks. A shower of stones came flying through the air. Yen Olass dived. Hit the water and struggled for the depths. She was out of luck. The river here was at its widest and shallowest, the water scarcely waist-deep. Men stormed into the water. Yen Olass swam into a thicket of legs, spears and bamboo poles. She was grabbed, punched, slapped and forced back into the shallows.

  Then the men drew back, so everyone could have a good view.

  Yen Olass sat in the water, crying, sobbing, covering her face with her hands. She cried with the hopeless misery of a hurt and hunted creature with no refuge. The Princess Quenerain, looking down on this bedraggled creature, pe
rmitted herself the faintest of smiles.

  Then a rock took her in the chest.

  Quenerain gasped, sinking to her knees in the water. With open eyes – in the end, she had something of her father's undying courage – she faced the men. And saw them waver. Like a reflection in water.

  Water, yes.

  Quenerain sketched a picture in the water with her finger. She drew it very carefully, yet when she looked, there was nothing to be seen. Why? She smoothed the surface of the water with her hands and tried again. No picture. Puzzled, she looked around for a stick. Perhaps with a stick she could draw a better picture.

  'Mother,' said Haveros.

  He sat down in the water with his back against hers. She was his mother. She had been missing for so long: he was glad to have found her. He closed his eyes. For some reason, he felt very tired.

  Yen Olass Ampadara watched Haveros and the Princess Quenerain. Why were they sitting in the water like that, back to back? Why was Haveros nodding off? Why was Quenerain drawing pictures in the water? Because they were human, of course, and human beings were notoriously unstable and unreasonable creatures.

  Everywhere Yen Olass looked, there was proof of this. As far as she could see, the ground was swarming with human creatures, some eating mud, some eating their own fingers, some humping each other in the muck, some grasping at invisible insects, some trying to fly.

  Looking further afield, to Castle Vaunting, Yen Olass saw what appeared to be human beings jumping from the battlements into the flames of the moat. Or were they being thrown? It did not matter: it did not concern her. Why not? Because she was an otter. That was why.

  Yes.

  For a moment she had suspected that she might be human herself, so it was with a feeling of immense relief that she realized she was really an otter. She walked deeper into the water, lay down in the cool of the river, and let the water take her. Floating downstream on her back, she smiled at the sky, and kicked her feet, but not very hard, because her legs hurt if she kicked hard.