Plenilune (84 page)

Yanking her skirt out of her way she rocked to her feet, impatiently grabbed her sword out of the dead war-lord’s face, and flung her back against Dammerung’s.

“Arrow,” he shouted into her ear.

“Rummy way to go,” she yelled back—in the heat of things, it seemed to take too long to tell him how grateful she was for him flinging her on her face before it could be split open by a stray bolt.

Aikin made a roundabout gesture with one hand. “Here comes my father!” he bawled.

She stood in the eye of the storm, the sky the colour of an elfhorn’s bugle above her. The gate-doors shrugged apart as Dammerung’s people surged around it, closed around it, shield to shield, horse-flank to horse-flank. The first horse to come through the doors wore a head-piece full of blazing antlers, a cloak of scarlet billowing over its hindquarters. Soldier after soldier poured after him, mingled with the friendly relief: the two forces became one.

In all that noise and tumult she was sure she had not heard a voice. Yet she
had
heard a voice. She ripped her gaze off the beauty of Mark Roy in full war regalia and turned, mud-stained, panting, herself a wreck of wrathful blood and terror. Two things she had learned: that she was not much good with a sword, and that a man is alone in the press of a battle-field. She looked out alone after the voice which had called with a sense more like feeling.

If she had not recognized the voice she would not have recognized him. A stone’s throw away a torn, ragged, mud-clotted, bloodied man stood, on the brink of turning away, but staying a moment, hoping to catch her eye. The face was blackened by blood and mud and smoke—the eyes were too far away to see clearly.

The figure raised its hand and almost beckoned.

Something inside her screamed in an angry, torn confusion, a sudden profound weariness, a smallness, a helplessness—when out of the cloud-wrack, above the dark furring of woods that bordered the river, she saw the argent bow of earth. It meant nothing to her, she felt nothing akin at the sight of it, but it was like the eye of a dragon in appearance, a majestic, ever-gazing thing hung above her, watching her, and on a quick swell of wind she turned from the man of blood and ran with the wind at her heels to rejoin Dammerung.

The War-wolf shone in the growing gloom. He had reclaimed his horse, and leaned over holding the reins of hers so that it would not bolt. She jammed her foot in the stirrup and leapt into the saddle: an old, familiar movement now.

“One more charge, sir,” he was telling Mark Roy. “Once more and we’ll have them into the river.”

And all Mark Roy said was, “We are ready.”

They were the flower of Plenilune, Margaret saw. Looking along the line of the land-owners and war-lords of the Honours, save for Skander Rime and Woodbird Swan-neck, who were conspicuously missing, the grim, high faces of the blue-bloods shone with a soft red light in the shadows: Mark Roy, Aikin Ironside, Brand the Hammer, Grane and Lord Gro, each black-crowned and terrible, Centurion of Darkling with his horse a-dance beneath him with excitement, Black Malkin robed like death, and others, others which were the pillars of the world.

The old pain came back, the old pain of unbelonging, and Margaret withdrew a little into herself to keep the pain at bay.

The flurry of the second charge was diminished by the memory of the first one. The pain in her chest rooted her to her body and, after that first crazed ride into the closing ranks of Rupert’s soldiers, which had been like the shredded black banners of a nightmare, the second charge—upswept thunder of horses into the riverscrub and rolling bank country, skirting sudden rocky walls, plunging headlong over fallen timber and wet water-soaked trees—seemed clear and sharp to Margaret. The land was darkened, the sky a heavy panel of hammered bronze—like the lid of a pot clamped down over the war seething below.

The rich, throaty call of a horn blared nearby her. Mausoleum put down his head and shuddered after Dammerung, but at that moment Rubico turned on his heel, cutting Mausoleum off, and Margaret saw a figure rush out of the sound of the horn, battle-axe raised, to meet the man on the warhorse. It was a huge, dark figure, bearded like a badger, roaring an incoherent hatred that she had come to know of war.

How strange. The man had always been so soft of speech
.

The weapons sang together, rang and crashed, and flew away like spitting, shooting stars. The three bodies, men and horse, blurred in the shadows and seemed born of them. Margaret felt the genius of the moment overwhelm her with urgency: this was the moment of mastery, the moment from which there was no turning back. With death like a cloak about his shoulders, the old Master of Marenov� raised up his infamous sword against the disloyal lord—vengeance glittered on the blade—and shaved down beneath the uplifted axe, beneath the badger’s beard, cutting the head from the shoulders. The mighty body heaved to one knee and then flat on its front—and Talus Perey was without lord or master or warm hearth.

Aikin’s eerie war-cry, like the ecstatic scream of a peacock, split the dusk air and soared, for a moment, over the heavy din of battle. She did not see him; she heard him, and the sound of him lifted up her heart like a torch on fire. It was like a cheer for paradise—a paradise unwon without bloodshed.

She was on the front lines with Dammerung when the first wave of enemy soldiers were pushed into the river. There was a desperate struggle—her blade got messy—a bitter grapple on the water’s edge, then a splash and a cry choked off by a sword’s bite, a rending of the heavens by a friendly horn, and the enemy ranks gave way.

Pipe to the old macabre dance—

It’s all a-one to me.

Mausoleum fetched up violently against a bit of brush-furze and gave a startled scream, kicking out against the pain. A bolt flickered by her ear and made her wince and the world turn dark a moment. With the suddenness of a plug being pulled, the blaze of the moment passed her and she clung to her horse’s mane, breathless, cold, out of place like a hare caught in a dual of falcons. Where had her sword gone? Had she lost it in the bush? Where was Dammerung? He seemed to have been spirited away.

Alone for a moment in the swirl of battle, Margaret tried to regain her bearings. Squinting against the sky’s glare off the water she peered ahead into the gloom. There were men in the water, but none of them answered to Dammerung’s figure. The land around her was a mess of shadows and moving bodies. The anger of panic twisted her lip between her teeth until it stung in the place where it had once been split.

Move!
said an imperious voice.
Move, thou blockhead!—move before he finds you!

“She-e-e ha!” she cried, digging her heels into her horse’s sweating flanks. With a piteous squeal the horse lumbered forward over the dark, uneven ground. There were sounds of a concentrated fight going on upstream; she steered toward it.

“Is the lady lost?” said a voice at her elbow.

“Oh!” she cried, flinching before she placed the voice as Dammerung’s. Then, ashamed of her fear, she retorted, “Where were you? I lost you by the river.”

She could not see his face clearly in the dusk. “I—don’t know,” he admitted, his tone apologetic. “Here and there. On the threshold of life and death. Nowhere new. I’m here now,” he added.

She put the back of her muddy hand against her cold, sweating brow. “It’s too dark to see friend from foe now. Are we finished, can you tell?”

And the voice of the War-wolf, rumbling out of the dark, rumbling out of that place between life and death, said, “For now. It is not finished, but we hold the field. For now.”

They had come to a little rise of land covered in short clover-turf. Turning back, Margaret saw the last of the evening’s glow fading from the water. The cold fear was still upon her—she hoped it would go soon—and when she tried to lift her lip in a smile her chin trembled and the smile failed her and she felt how lonely it was to be on the brink of mortality.

“Did you meet him?” she asked, only half aware of her own words.

A momentary silence, then— “Our dice did not roll together in the cup today.”

Wearily, stiff-legged, and caked in muck and blood, they dismounted and she struggled along beside him across the last bit of grass and the churned, damp soil to the gates of the palace which, having shut behind their lord, were being opened again to receive them in.

They were met in the gate-breach by Romage. Unlike Black Malkin and Grane—and herself, Margaret realized, though she did not think she had done much in the way of good for the fight—the queen of Orzelon-gang had not gone out among the soldiers, but she stood as Margaret remembered her, regal and erect with a plume of torchlight around her, her ruddy crown piled atop her head and decked with peacocks’ feathers; a train of some shimmering black stuff flowed from her shoulders over her body, and in her hand she bore, like Victory, a spear with a collar of red junglefowl feathers.

Oh God
—Margaret balked in horror of herself.
I can’t—I simply—

“Good evening, your grace,” said the War-wolf, never perturbed by his appearance for an instant.

The amber-coloured eyes, darkened in the shadows, turned slowly and without surprise to Dammerung.

To thee the reed is as the oak
.

“My lord.” That soft, certain, honey-running voice. “You are most welcome here.”

Dammerung was quiet for a moment and the sounds of the soldiers putting to rest the battle behind them lingered softly on the outskirts. Margaret looked from face to face, reading in the silence a curious similarity between the young war-lord and the woman who was mother of two great war-lords and the wife of a war-lord among men.

It seemed the recognition was what had run between them, for Dammerung’s mouth jumped into a wry smile and he said, “I think that I salute another of my kind.”

Romage smiled—a distant, secret smile. “We are but children playing marbles with the pebbles your mighty foot upstirs.”

“False modesty does not become the gracious woman. Why else is Venus so bright a star?”

The crisp dark brows flickered upward in a momentarily startled amusement; Romage glanced for a second to Margaret—it was only a moment, a heartbeat, but she felt the touch of those eyes like a warm pressure on her cheek. Before she could say anything more—and others were coming up to join them—Dammerung added in a swift undertone,

“The look is unmistakeable, my dear. When you have seen
it
, it shows.”

She was looking on beyond them, head upraised, to watch her husband approaching, but her smile was as much for Dammerung’s words as for the man labouring up the slight slope toward her.

“My hearts!” cried the king breathlessly. “My hounds. Oh, you, too, my lady?” He landed his hand on Dammerung’s shoulder and turned to Margaret, surprised.

The fear wavered at the back of her throat, shaking her words, but she pushed them to the forefront gamely. “I, too, my lord. Not a one to sit idle while Plenilune is in danger.”

Mark Roy nodded appreciatively and Dammerung, looking at her across the king’s shoulders, threw her a wink and a smile that twisted her in her middle with a sudden unchecked joy.

“Are you all unscathed?” asked Romage as her two sons and Centurion approached. Huw, hesitant, trailed behind them with a pretty gash over one brow and an arm that he seemed to be favouring.

Her eldest son made to lean in to kiss her, then, realizing what a mess he was, stopped short of the gesture. “Mostly, I think.”

“It is in my mind,” said Dammerung, pursuing his original subject, “that her grace had little doubt of that.”

Mark Roy pushed through them all and took his wife’s hand—though which supported the other, Margaret, looking carefully, could not say. “All things are laid bare before him with whom we have to do. Come in, all of you. My men will see to the field. Tonight I will toast to the victory on the field and show you—my lady, did I not say that you ought to come and dine with us here in Orzelon-gang?” As they walked into the forecourt he half turned, catching Margaret’s eye.

But her gaze was already being drawn off into the golden lights and thick red shadows around them. Was that a dragon she saw at the top of that pillar—was the pillar itself a dragon holding up the colonnade roof? “Yes, you had,” she answered absent-mindedly. “And it quite surpasses your description.”

“Come along in,” came back Romage’s jewelled voice. “I will take her ladyship. Will Black Malkin and Grane join us?”

“They are seeing to their own people,” said Brand, “and then I think they were of a mind to join us for supper.”

At the inner gate, which was made of bronze and decorated with the sweeping bodies and tails of two enormous metal peacocks, Romage slipped out of her husband’s grasp and held out her hand—a long, fine, beautiful hand—and beckoned for Margaret. A swift, powerful loathing to detach herself from Dammerung stopped her for a moment, but then she made herself go, one foot in front of the other though her legs seemed like unlovely lead. The queen slid an arm in hers and took her through the doors.

They passed into the fabled room of the black pools and golden fish. At first, disoriented by the sudden dark and peeps of red light and draped red linen from the upper corners of the atrium, Margaret thought the golden flickers in the water were reflections of hidden light until, passing on the edge of one long pool, she saw the light turn slowly, hugely, and drift to the surface. A red-and-white mottled face appeared out of the shifting black, wet and whiskered like a water-drake, and then slipped under again with a kiss of closing water.

“You like them?” Romage did not turn her head.

Had her legs been more serviceable, Margaret thought she might have stopped and knelt on the water’s edge to get a better look at the creatures, and perhaps even—her flesh tingled—have touched one. In the dark she could get no clear image of them—they never moved quickly, but seemed to be always shifting out of the light into the dark again—but they looked enormous: huge, half-spirit things made of light and blood and bodies living in a strange, powerful medium. They seemed, in those disjointed, dark moments, to be akin to her.