Sun Wolf 1 - The Ladies Of Mandrigyn (33 page)

The mercenaries closed in around him.

It took her a few extra seconds to cut the reins of the horses from the tether rope; the men were yelling and laughing and never saw her until she was mounted. She fired into their midst, calmly and without rage; her first arrow took the captain straight through the throat, above the iron-plated doublet; her second pinned the camp follower between the breasts.

She was mounted; the height and the weight of the horse gave her an edge over their numbers, though later she suspected that she would have taken on the twelve of them, even had she been afoot. She came plowing in among them from the darkness, the last light flashing from her sword blade as from the sickle of the Death Goddess of ancient days—silent, inhuman, merciless as the Plague Star. She killed two before they even had their weapons drawn, and the horse accounted for a third, rearing as they closed around it and smashing the man’s skull with an iron-shod hoof. Another man seized her leg to pull her down and she took his hands off at the wrists. She left him standing, screaming, staring at the spouting stumps, as she turned and beheaded the other camp follower and another man who was grabbing at her from the opposite side. Two men had the bridle, dragging and twisting to pull the horse down; she dug in her heels and drove the animal straight ahead over them, so that they had to release their grip or be trampled. One of them she hacked through the shoulder as she went by, and he crumpled, screaming and kicking in the plowed, wet pine mast.

All this she did calmly, without feeling. She was a technician of death and good at her job; she knew what she wanted to do. The men were running in all directions, drunk and confused. Someone got to the packs; a moment later, an arrow embedded itself in the saddletree a few inches from her leg. She wheeled the horse and rode at the man. Another shaft sang wide beside her, his aim erratic from panic or from cheap gin; then he dropped his bow and ran, and she cut him through the spine as she overtook his flight.

The men who were chasing the fleeing horses she brought down with arrows, as if they were hares. Only the last stood and fought her, sword to sword, when her arrows were spent; and though she was dismounted by this time and he was both larger and heavier than she, she had the advantage of speed.

She pulled her grating sword blade from his ribs, wiped it on his clothes, and turned back to where Anyog lay in the trampled slush. The cold brightness of battle still clung to her; she looked down at the crumpled body and thought. Another deader.

Then the grief hit her, like the howling of a wolf at the moon.

She looked around her at the bodies that lay like dark lumps of mud against the slightly lighter blur of the pine needles. The air smelled heavy with blood, like a battlefield; already foxes were creeping from the woods, sniffing at the carrion. In the night, there would be wolves. She saw that at least one of the mercenaries had been a woman, something that she hadn’t noticed in the heat of the fight. And none of their deaths would bring Anyog back.

Gently, she knelt beside him and turned him over. His breath caught in a gasp of pain; she saw that he was not, in fact, dead; but he would have to be a powerful wizard indeed to pull himself back from the darkness now. Around her, the trees began to whisper under the falling of rain.

Starhawk worked through the night, rigging a shelter for him and for the fire she built, and making a travois. Beyond the circle of the firelight, she was conscious of continual movement, of faint snarlings and growls, and huge green eyes that flashed with the reflected light. The single horse she had salvaged—one of Pel Farstep’s—snorted with fear and jerked at its tether, but nothing threatened them from the rainy blackness. The kill was fresh and enough to glut a pack.

The sodden dawn was barely glimmering through the trees when she moved on. She collected what little food the mercenaries had carried, plus several skins of raw liquor—Blind White, it was called—and all the arrows she could recover. As she was tying Anyog to the travois, the dark eyes opened, glazed with pain, and he whispered, “Dove?”

“I’m here,” she said gruffly. “Uncle, I’m sorry. I . . . ”

His voice was a thread. “Couldn’t let you face . . . Altiokis . . . alone . . . ”

He coughed, bringing up blood. Starhawk stood up and went to hang the rest of their meager supplies over the various projections of the saddle, fighting the guilt that came from bitter enlightenment and the sudden understanding of why Anyog had joined her in her hopeless quest. She stood for a moment, leaning her throbbing head against the horse’s withers while the rain streamed down through her pale, dripping hair. Ram had taken his courage in his hands, as he had said, and spoken to her; and having spoken, had been turned down. Perhaps it was Anyog’s age that had robbed him of the courage to speak, or perhaps it was the prior knowledge that his love for her would not be returned. But it was the old man, not the young, who had come with her to his death.

Starhawk sighed. She had learned a long time ago that crying only wasted time. They had a long road to go.

It was almost nightfall before they came to shelter. Because she could not scout the countryside, Starhawk backtrailed the mercenaries, hoping that they had spent the previous night in a place not too exposed to the elements. The rain had lightened through the afternoon, but the cold was deeper, and she began to fear snow. The road led them up the hard, rocky tracks into the higher foothills, skirting the deep flood meres and the sour bogs that surrounded them. In the end, it led her to a high valley, a sort of bay wedged among the tall cliffs, where a chapel had been built, looking like something that had grown of itself from the lichened stones.

The chapel was filthy. It had clearly served as a stable, and its altar had been further defiled by all the gross usages of which drunken and violent men were capable when they grew bored. Starhawk was used to this kind of thing and had moreover been raised to believe that the worship of the Triple God was an intellectualized heresy; nevertheless, she was angered that men would treat holy things so, simply because they were holy.

Still, the roof was intact, and the single doorway narrow enough to forbid the entrance of wild beasts, if a fire were kindled there. She cleared a place among the mess to lay Anyog down and set about gathering damp brushwood, then barked her knuckles with flint and steel lighting it.

It snowed in the night, with bitter wind keening around the open chapel door. By dawn, it was obvious to Starhawk that Uncle Anyog would never recover.

Yet he was too tough to die quickly. He lingered on the cloudy borderlands of death, sometimes in a cold sleep that she would have mistaken for death, had it not been for the painful wheezing of his breath, other times weeping and raving feebly of Altiokis, of the nuuwa, of his sister, or singing snatches of poems and songs in a cracked little voice like the grating of a rusty hinge. Occasionally he was lucid enough to recognize her cropped hair and brass-studded doublet as the marks of a trooper and struggled with feeble determination against the gruel she fed him or the water she washed him with.

On the third night of this, it crossed her mind that the sensible thing to do would be to kill him and go on with her quest. There was no hope of his recovery—even if what remained of the little wizardry he had been taught was strong enough to pull him back from death, it would be long before he could embark on another journey by travois. One way or the other, she would have to free Sun Wolf from the Citadel of the Wizard King alone, without the aid of a wizard—without the hope now of ever finding one.

It was better that she got on with it and did not delay further.

Yet she stayed. The cold deepened over the high peaks, and the snow locked its grip on the valley tighter. Daily the Hawk trudged to the few tufts of birch and aspen at the lower end of the little valley by the spring to cut firewood. She saw in the snow the marks where deer had pawed at the crust to feed on the dead grasses underneath; she hunted, and the calm absorption of it eased her heart. During the night she meditated, contemplating in the stillness of the Invisible Circle the truths of her own violent soul. In spite of her own faith in the Mother, she tended the altar of the Triple God, ridding the chapel of its pollutions and cleansing the stone with ritual fire; and in that, too, she found comfort.

Night after night she sat listening to Anyog’s quiet murmuring and staring out into the still darkness of the silent valley and the flooded lands beyond.

What had happened to her, she wondered, those weeks in Pel Farstep’s tall stone house? She did not want to become like them, like the busy, bustling Pel or the placid Gillie. So why did her mind keep returning to that peaceful place and the small beauties of everyday things?

Would she even love the Wolf when she met him again, or would she find that he was like the men she had killed, brutish, dirty, and crass?

The Mother knew, she’d seen him perform worse outrages than that when they’d sacked cities.

But her own experience with the wild, careless arrogance of victory prevented her from thinking that what one did during a sack was what one would do in cold blood.

Would it be better if she found that she did not love him, for that matter? Had Fawnie had the right idea, to marry a well-off man who would cherish her?

If the Wolf was a mercenary like the others, why did she still love him enough to seek him? And if she still loved him with that same determination, why did she not kill Anyog, who was dying anyway, bury him, and leave?

From there she would settle herself into meditation; but the answers that she found within its stillness were not the answers that she sought.

One night the wind changed, squalling down over the mountains in a fury of driving, intermittent rain. Droplets hissed loudly in the little fire; Starhawk could hear its fitful beating against the stone walls of the chapel, but within the hollow darkness at the far end of the holy place, the altar lights burned with a steady, hypnotic glow. Her mind focused upon them, drawing them into herself, and the light and darkness merged and clarified into one entity—rain and earth, wind and silence, that which was known and that which was yet to be—the single Circle of Is.

She found herself in another wind-sounding darkness, hearing the far-off beating of the sea. She knew the place well—the Mother’s chapel on the cliffs, part of the Convent of St. Cherybi, which she had left to follow Sun Wolf to learn the ways of war. She had heard of other nuns doing this, for each point of the Invisible Circle was each point, everywhere, and it was possible, she had heard, to step from one to another.

Moonlight shone down through the sky-hole, the only illumination in that dark place, a blinding sliver on the edge of her drawn sword. Peace filled her, as it had always done here. She wondered if this were a dream of her past, but knew, even as she formulated the thought, that it was not so. There were small changes from what she had known—weather stains on the floor and the walls, slight shifts in the way the vessels stood upon the bare stone of the shadow-obscured altar—which told her that she was truly there, and this did not surprise her.

When she saw Sun Wolf, standing in the darkness near the door, she knew that he, too, was truly there—that he had come there to find her . . . 

She had never cried as an adult. But when she returned to the barren darkness of the chapel in the Stren
Water
Valley, tears were icy on her face, and exultation and bitter grief warred in her heart.

I’m sorry I did not know it in time,
he had said. And yet, when he lay dying in Mandrigyn, he had contrived to come to her.

So near,
she thought. Had I not stayed in Pergemis with Fawn . . . 

But she knew she could not have deserted the girl.

Grief and defeat and exhaustion weakened her; long after her sobbing had ceased, the tears ran down from her open eyes. She had followed him for years to war, and they had saved each other’s life a dozen times, almost casually. She must have known, she told herself, that he was going to die sometime.

Was this grief because she had always expected to be at his side when it happened? Or because of this stupid, cursed, miserable condition that people called love, which had broken her warrior’s strength and given her nothing in return?

She wondered what she would do, now that he was dead.

The gray house in Pergemis came to her mind, with the booming of the sea and the mewing of the wheeling gulls. Pel Farstep had said that Starhawk would always have a home with them. Yet it would be shabby treatment of so good a man as Ram to make him forever her second choice; and shabbier still to live in that house, but not as his wife. Though the peace that she had felt there called to her, she knew in her heart that their way—to count money, and raise children, and wait for ships to come in—was not her way.

Wrynde?
It was peace of another sort, the rainy quiet of the winters and the mindless violence and glory of campaign. Her friends among the mercenaries returned to her mind, along with the bright joys of battle and war. But what was known could never be unknown. One day, she thought, she might become a warrior again. But having lived among her victims, she knew that she could never ride to the sacking of a town.

The altar lights flickered. As she walked through the darkness of the chapel to trim them, she automatically made the sign of respect, although it was a holy place of the Three, not of the One—the worship of the Triple God had always struck her as rather sterile and businesslike; and in any case, she knew that ritual was for the benefit of the worshipper and not from any need of the God’s.

As she stood in the deep silence beside the altar stone, it came to her that she could remain here.

The chapel’s guardian had been chased away or killed by the mercenaries who had camped here, but the building had been recently inhabited. Even in the depths of the holy place, the crying of the wind came to her, and the sporadic flurries of rain; it was close to dawn, the valley around the chapel an empty darkness, inhabited only by winds, wolves, and deer. To have this life, this peace . . . this place of meditation and solitude . . . a place to find her own road . . .