Sun Wolf 1 - The Ladies Of Mandrigyn (21 page)

When she turned back, Ram and Orris were already cutting loose the thing that gripped Fawn. By the light of Ram’s torch, it could be seen to be covered with soot that made a blackish muck, mingled with its spouting blood. Fawn was unconscious. For a sickening instant, Starhawk thought that she was dead.

The Wolf will never forgive me . . . 

My rival . . . 

Was I deliberately slow?

Great Mother, no wonder he says it’s unprofessional to love! It makes hash of your fighting instinct!

“They’re coming down the chimney,” she said. Ram was just standing up. It could not have been more than sixty seconds from the time Fawn had opened the kitchen door. “They’ll be all over the roof.”

With a quickness astonishing in so huge a man, Ram was at the nearest window, peering through a knot in the shutter at the thin moonlight outside. From within the kitchen, there was a crashing and a vast yammer of sounds; the great bolts of the door sagged suddenly under the heaving weight of bodies.

“Can we break for it?” he demanded, turning back. The dot of moonlight lay like a little coin on his flat-boned, unshaven cheek.

“Are you mad?” Orris demanded hoarsely. “They’ll be off the roof and on our backs—”

“Not if we torch the inn.”

“Look, you gaum-snatched cully, they’ll have left some to guard the doors—”

“No,” the Hawk said. She’d rushed to the other side of the room to open the shutter there a crack. The chink of air showed the white snow of the street empty between the blackness of the buildings. “They don’t even have the brains to work in concert, as wolves do. Having found a way into the inn, they’ll all take it. Listen, they don’t even know enough for them all to throw themselves against the door at once or to use the table in there for a ram.”

Orris got to his feet, with Fawn limp and white in his arms, except for the spreading smear of crimson on her shift. “By the Three, creatures more witless than my brothers!” he cried. “I never thought to find them.”

“You’ll find as many of them as you can do with, if you don’t stir those moss-grown clubs you’ve been calling feet all these years,” Ram snapped, making a run for the mules’ parlor. Starhawk was seizing torches and throwing together bedding, one ear turned always to listen to the growing din in the kitchen. She raked what was left in the wood box against the kitchen door and picked up a torch from the blaze on the hearth.

“What about Anyog?” Orris demanded, and knelt at the old man’s side. “We can’t make a litter, nor even a travois . . . ”

“Pack him like killed meat, then,” the Hawk retorted, having been taken off battlefields that way herself. “He’ll die, anyway, if he’s left here.” Already she could see the hinges of the kitchen door moving under the thrashing weight. Orris stared at her, gape-mouthed with horror. “Rot you, do as I say!” she shouted, as she would at a trooper in battle. “We haven’t time to waste!”

Orris scrambled to obey her. If Anyog is a wizard, she thought, Altiokis or no Aitiokis, he’ll put forth what power he has to stay alive. That’s all we can hope for now.

But just as she was a professional soldier, the brothers were professional merchants and could pack five mules and a donkey with the lightning speed acquired in hundreds of emergency disencampments. In moments, it seemed, the mules were squealing and kicking in the hall, with Orris cursing them and lashing at them with a switch. Ram came running back to Starhawk’s side, an axe and wedges from the wood room like toys in his great hands. From the tail of her eye, Starhawk had a glimpse of the long, muffled bundle that was Uncle Anyog tied over the back of one mule and of Fawn, somehow on her feet and wrapped in the old man’s rusty black coat, stumbling to open the great outside doors.

Icy air streamed in on them. The ululations of the creatures in the kitchen had grown to fever pitch. The doors were sagging as she and Ram made the rounds of the other parlors. Flame licked upward over the rafters and blazed in the mules’ straw that they’d scattered across the floor. The kitchen door was breaking as she flung her torch at it, then raced back through the furnace of the common room to where Ram waited for her, framed against the snowy night beyond.

Half a dozen wedges sealed the doors. As they sprang down the steps to where Orris waited with the mules, the Hawk glanced back to see, silhouetted against the roof flames, the black shapes of the nuuwa, shrieking and screaming like the souls of the damned in the Trinitarian hells.

Nothing challenged them as they made their way from the town. As they wound their way up the road into the mountains beyond, they could see the light behind them for a long time.

“Mother’s crying.”

Sun Wolf glanced up at this new, soft voice intruding into the solitude of the rain-wet garden. Sheera’s daughter, Trella, who was sitting beside him with the trowel and handrake in her small grip, said automatically, “She isn’t either.”

The tiny boy who had brought this news picked his way through the damp, turned ground to where the Wolf and the little girl sat on a huge rock; he seemed infinitely careful about not getting mud on his black slippers and hose. Trella, who was six and had been assisting Sun Wolf in his duties as gardener since he had come to Sheera’s townhouse, had no such considerations. Her black wool skirts were kilted up almost to her thighs, and two little legs in wrinkled black stockings stuck out over the edge of the rock like sticks.

The boy said nothing, only stared at them both with Sheera’s beautiful, pansy-brown eyes.

“Mother never cries nowadays. And Nurse says you’re not supposed to suck your thumb like a baby,” Trella added, as a clinching argument.

He removed thumb from mouth, but held onto it with his other hand, as if he were afraid it would fall off or dry out if not protected. “She cried when Father died,” he said defensively. “And Nurse says you’re not supposed to sit on rocks and plays with the slaves.”

“I’m not playing with him, I’m helping him work,” Trella said with dignity. “Aren’t I?”

“Indeed you are,” Sun Wolf replied gravely, but there was a glitter of amusement in his beer-colored eyes as he regarded Sheera’s children.

He seldom saw Graal Galemas, age four; though the boy was physically a miniature Sheera, he was soft, rather timid, and stood very much upon his dignity as the head of the House of Galernas. Trella presumably favored their deceased father; she was a sandy-haired, hazel-eyed, snub-nosed child who stood in awe of no one but her beautiful mother. Sun Wolf had met the two when they’d sneaked away from their nurse to play in the orangery, as was evidently their wont. It was a custom Sheera had never mentioned, and he wondered if she knew. Graal had bored quickly of gardening, but Trella had helped him build the succession houses along the south orangery wall, in the course of which project she had provided him with a surprising and varied assortment of information about Sheera herself.

Now Graal said, “She did too cry when Father died.”

Trella shrugged. “She was crying before that. She cried when the messengers came to the house about the battle and she was crying when she got back from Lady Tilth’s later that day. And I heard her crying down in the kitchen when she was mulling some wine for Father.”

“She never did that,” her brother contradicted, still hanging onto his thumb. “We’ve got servants to mull wine.” He was shivering, despite the silver-laced velvet of his tiny doublet; though it had stopped raining some hours ago, the day was cold and the air damp. In the barren drabness of the empty garden, he looked like a dropped jewel against the dirt.

“Well, she did too,” Trella retorted. “I was playing in the pantry and I heard her. And then she went up to her room and cried and cried and she was still up there when Father got stomach cramps and died, so there.”

Tears flooded the boy’s soft eyes, and his thumb returned to his mouth. Around it he mumbled wretchedly, “Nurse says you’re not supposed to play in the pantry.”

“That was months and months and months ago, and if you tattle, I’ll put a snail in your bed.” Just to be prepared, she hopped down from the rock and began to hunt for the promised snail. Graal backed hastily away and fled crying toward the house.

Sun Wolf sat, his knees drawn up, on the river-smoothed stone and watched the child go. Then he glanced back at the little girl, still grubbing purposefully about in the loose, turned earth of the rock garden bed he’d been preparing. “He loved your father, didn’t he?”

She straightened up, flushed and sullen. “He’s just a baby.” That, evidently, settled father and brother both.

If they knew so much, the Wolf wondered whether they knew about their mother and Tarrin as well.

He himself would no more have told a child that her father was a collaborator or her mother a slut than he would have whipped a puppy for something it did not do, and for pretty much the same reasons. He looked upon children as young animals, and neither Graal nor Trella seemed to mind this offhand treatment. But his own childhood had taught him that there was very little that men and women would not do to their children.

He wondered what it was that Sheera had gotten from Yirth to put in her husband’s mulled wine.

Wind stirred the bare branches of the hedges above the hollow where they worked; silver droplets of rain shook loose over them. Sun Wolf paid the drops no heed—he’d been wet and cold a good portion of his life and thought nothing of it—and Trella, who had been consciously imitating him for some weeks, ignored them as well. The smell of the earth mingled with the damp, musty silence as he arranged and rearranged the smooth, bare bones of the rocks, seeking the indefinable harmony of shape, and it wasn’t until much later that Trella broke the silence.

“She isn’t crying,” she declared. After a moment she added, “And anyway, it’s just because that man’s here to see her.”

“That man,” Sun Wolf knew, was Derroug Dru, Altiokis’ governor of Mandrigyn.

Sure enough, a short while later he saw the dapper little figure of the governor emerge from the orangery and stroll along the path with a servant to hold a gilt-tasseled umbrella over his head. The family resemblance to Drypettis was marked; both were tiny, but where Drypettis was slender, Governor Derroug Dru was a skinny, crooked little runt, the haughty set of whose head and shoulders dwindled rapidly to weak and spindly legs. One leg was nothing more than a twisted bone cased in silken hose whose discreet padding accentuated, rather than hid, its deformity; he walked with a cane, and Sun Wolf had seen how all of his entourage slowed their steps to match his, not out of courtesy, but out of fear. His thinning brown hair was suspiciously bright around the temples, and his eyes, brown and dissipated, were carefully painted to hide the worst marks of excess. Right now, he had only the one servant with him, but the Wolf knew he usually traveled with a whole shoal of hangers-on and several bodyguards. He was not a man popular in Mandrigyn.

Amber Eyes had told the Wolf that before Altiokis had taken the town, she and her friends used to draw straws, the short straw having to take Derroug. Since he had become governor, his vices had become more open.

Sun Wolf bent his head, smoothing the damp earth around the stones. He heard the tap of the cane and the slightly dragging stride pause on the flagstoned path; he felt the man’s eyes on him, hating him for his height. Then Derroug passed on. It was beneath the dignity of the governor of Mandrigyn to notice a slave seriously.

At his elbow, Trella’s voice whispered, “I hate him!”

He glanced from the little girl to the elegant figure ascending the terrace steps, a splash of white fur and lilac silks against the mottled grays and moss-stained reds of the back of the house and the startling white of the marble of pavement and pilaster. Sheera never spoke of the governor, but he had come to see her several times since the Wolf had been there, and never when Drypettis was present. Sun Wolf guessed that the little woman ran interference between her brother and her friend—which, totally aside from her former position in the conspiracy, might explain Sheera’s attachment to her.

It had begun to rain again. The children’s nurse came bustling along the path to scold Trella for being out without a maidservant, for not wearing her veils, for getting her hands dirty, and for consorting with a rough and dirty man. “Speaking to a man alone . . . a fine little trull people will take you for!” she clucked, and Trella hung her head.

Sun Wolf wiped his hands on his patched breeches and said dryly, “I’ve been accused of a lot of things in my time, woman, but this is the first anyone’s ever thought I’d try to corrupt a six-year-old.” He did not like the nurse.

She elevated her well-shaped little nose to a slightly more lofty angle than usual and retorted, “It is the principle. A girl cannot learn too young what is beyond the lines of propriety. It appalls me to see what is happening in the town these days—women going barefaced and sitting right out at the counters of public shops like prostitutes in their windows . . . and consorting with prostitutes, too, I shouldn’t wonder! That hussy who was here earlier actually had paint on her face! What my old lord would have said . . . ”

She retreated down the path, holding the unwilling child close to her skirts, clucking and fluttering to herself about the city’s fall from virtue.

Sun Wolf shook his head and gathered up his tools. The rain was the fine, blowing, fitful sort that heralded a heavier storm come nightfall; it plastered his long hair down over his shoulders and soaked quickly through the coarse canvas of his shirt. Still, he stood for a time, studying the rocks where he’d settled them—the smooth granite boulder buried half heeled over, so that the long fissure in its side was visible and it formed a sort of cave underneath, protected by the four smaller stones. The lines of it were right, making a sort of music against the starkness of the liver-colored earth, but he thought that he would have liked to have Starhawk’s opinion.

In a way it troubled him, how often that thought had crossed his mind.

He had always known she was a good lieutenant. Not only her skill in taking on and defeating much larger men but also the inhuman cold-bloodedness that she habitually showed the troops put them in awe of her, and that was as it should be. As a leader, he had valued her wary painstakingness and her lucidness in defining problems and solutions. As a man set apart by his position as chief, he had valued her company.