Wolf Wing

by Tanith Lee

  Neither Argul nor I spoke. Though sometimes we turned to look – at that rosy bird fluttering into a tree, and that hare leaping away into a clovery orchard of ripening cherry trees. He didn’t offend me by saying, It’s quite nice, isn’t it, here. But I offended me by thinking it.

  Well. It is.

  It’s beautiful. Always was. If you were allowed to enjoy it.

  We’d been striding along about three-quarters of an hour, when we heard voices, and I thought, Ah, some delightful icky lords and ladies, from the jolly sounds.

  We were in a walk with huge tall yew hedges either side, cut in shapes like stars and birds and things, and to my extra surprise, I couldn’t quite remember what this walk led out to. Probably I’d not been that often so far out in the Garden – most of my tasks, and the rituals, had involved places nearer the House.

  I paused. No, let’s be honest, I froze.

  Now I thought any sort of Plan would be better than the one I’d devised. I mean, we could have gone over the Garden at night, unseen. Positioned ourselves where we could see the House, looked out for Pattoo and the others next day – then cunningly approached them, persuaded them, carried them off through the sky if necessary … providing the Power jewels could cope with their extra weight.

  Only all that could have taken ages. And I wasn’t sure about the weight thing. I’d tried flying with some heavy books and couldn’t get very high up. And Daisy was quite light, while Pattoo and Dengwi were both bigger, although in different ways, Dengwi my height and slim, and Pattoo shorter but heavier. Argul could manage, but could I – the books had made my arms ache. And then we’d probably have to leave at least one person behind and go back for them, and might get seen, or they might get stopped—

  You can see.

  My final Plan however was insane.

  I simply meant to march in and ask – tell them – what I wanted. Use my Authority, as ghastly Lady Twilight would no doubt have said. She’d have thought I could do it, for sure. And I was relying too on the fact Jizania Tiger would know who I was, what I’d done, and that I might be very dangerous.

  Which had seemed all right until now.

  I glanced at Argul. He hadn’t put on particularly showy clothes. He doesn’t even dress Hulta much any more, not since we were in the north. He was peering through a gap in the hedge some way above my head.

  ‘What can you see?’ I hissed.

  A gust of eversomerry mirth pranced up from beyond the walk.

  ‘Several men and women playing a game with sticks, some little coloured balls, and small arches stuck in the ground.’

  ‘Oh, that’s Mallet,’ I said. I pulled a face. Lords and ladies definitely. ‘They’re royal.’

  ‘They look it. Royal and rich.’

  ‘Are you ready?’ I asked him.

  He met my gaze. ‘Are you?’

  ‘I’m—trying to be. But I think it’ll take longer than we’ve got.’

  ‘They’ll just run in terror,’ he said, ‘when they get blinded by that dress of yours.’

  This, from a Hulta – who feel naked without fringes, tassels, horsebells, coins—Then he laughed. Out loud. An easy, musical Argul laugh. (Curious, his voice is musical, though not when he sings.)

  But I realized he’d stopped my panic. Also that, deliberately, he’d let the tronkers round the hedge know that someone else was here.

  Sure enough, Argul said, ‘They’re all looking this way now. They don’t seem nervous yet, but then they don’t know it’s you, Claidi-baari.’

  ‘Forward march then.’

  And so we stalked out on to the lawn, I with my head held high and my eyes kept straight and ready as two arrows.

  And the first person my arrow-eyes saw was Pattoo, in a bright flowery gold-trimmed gown, standing there with her mallet-stick, interrupted in mid-smile.

  LION NIGHT

  ‘Pattooo?’

  ‘Claiiidi?’

  We teeter there, both our mouths open in amazement.

  Pattoo, dear, careful, over-concerned Pattoo, who tried never to get anything wrong – less from fear of our disgusting easily-offended mistress, Lady Jade Leaf, than from a basic Pattooishness – a need to do things correctly.

  She looked great in her flowery dress. She had a gold butterfly pinned in her hair, too. I mean – it was gold.

  ‘Pattoo—’ (again.)

  ‘Claidi—’ (again.)

  Someone giggled.

  I pulled my eyes away and saw Flamingo, another maid (though she hadn’t belonged to Lady J) all done up in flamingo-pink, hiccupping with amusement.

  Pattoo said, more calmly:

  ‘How are you, Claidi? You do look well.’

  ‘Well? I’m speechless!’ I shrieked. I then stared all around and took in the fine royal ladies and gents in their gorgeous clothes and ornaments. And they were all–all–ALL – servants.

  And that woman, there, she was a slave, and that old man – who is now a distinguished, princely Old Man – used to be a slave, too.

  I know he was. I recall once, when I was only a kid, I saw him beaten because he couldn’t pull Prince Shawb’s rotten chariot fast enough.

  And now – he’s in brocade, and he’s sipping something from a silver hip-flask. Only when he grins, I see the gap of the tooth Shawb also personally knocked out.

  Rather than running right at Pattoo and shaking her, to make sure she, and all of them, aren’t a dream, I say firmly, ‘Pattoo, whatever has happened?’

  ‘Oh, a lot,’ says Pattoo, flitting her big dark eyes up, down, at Argul. ‘To you too, I think. Hmm.’

  They told me then. We sat down on the Mallet Lawn, and someone produced a basket with fresh fruit and yellow wine, and over this they explained.

  I could not take it all in.

  ‘But you say it was because of what I did?’

  ‘Yes, Claidi. You and the Old Lady.’

  After a while, we’d eaten all the fruit and drunk all the wine. Then they carefully put away the Mallet things in a small shed (their property now, so they look after it as well as they always did) and we walked up through the rest of the Garden towards the House.

  Nearer, among the glasshouses and coldframes and grape-arbours, lots of people were working, and looking up were told ‘Claidi’s come to visit.’

  It was a big house, the House. There were hundreds of us. We didn’t all know each other, then, how could we have done. It was the royal people we knew, we had to. And now I looked into faces I didn’t recall, people I’d never met, or had only met as we were rushing to obey our owners, or crawling about scrubbing floors or something. And these unmet people, who had been servants and maids when I had been a maid, and who had been slaves, now left what they were doing and crowded round, as no servant or slave was ever at liberty to do.

  ‘Is this Claidi?’ ‘Yes, I remember Claidi.’ ‘Wow, this is CLAIDI!’

  ‘Fame at last,’ said Argul.

  He seemed at ease, but I knew he was keeping part of himself cool, silent and on guard.

  This was to have been another House of Enemies, where we must bluff and threaten our way, as so often before.

  Had everything really changed here so much?

  It seemed it had.

  They were still explaining. I was getting the hang of it at last.

  By the time I suddenly saw, through a drift of daffodil trees, the hated salmon and green structure of the House, I’d more or less come to believe what had happened here.

  The Revolution.

  They call that night now, Lion Night. It’s become a festival, which they celebrate at irregular intervals, really just when they feel like it. (Already they were saying it must be celebrated again tonight, in my honour.)

  When I’d escaped with Nemian, who had been the House prisoner, it was late – after midnight? – I can’t be sure, now. But no one was about, except the odd lion, because someone had also opened the lion house and let them out.

  Anyway, he and I went along the tunnels,
got outside by breaking open the last door, and were in the desert.

  Meanwhile, some other things took place.

  Pattoo told me. Jizania had provided drugged wine, not only for the House Guards house-guarding Nem, but for all the House Guards. Various maids took it to the guard tower, and anywhere else they happened to be. Jizania sent a message that she wanted to reward the Guards for valiantly shooting down Nemian’s balloon. Of course the twonksome guards always thought they were sensationally deserving, so they slurped the wine, and within ten minutes were out cold.

  The first thing anyone knew about this, was when some people ran into the Maids’ Hall in the darkness, yelling and waking everyone up. These people were Jizania’s servants, but at the time no one quite knew who they were.

  Here is the story they told: Claidi had risked her life to rescue the captured Nemian, and had taken him to safety outside the walls. The House Guards were drugged, by Claidi and by others.

  Then Jizania walked into the hall, without escort, and looking as always magnificent in her bald ancient beauty.

  ‘Listen to me,’ said Jizania to the startled servants, and they listened.’ Are you ready to be as brave as Claidi? If not,’ she added, ‘think how you will all be punished by your cruel and unjust masters. Do you think they’ll stand for this, to be cheated of their prisoner by one of you?’ And then Jizania had pointed all across the jostling scared crowd. She’d pointed at Dengwi. ‘You,’ said Jizania harshly. ‘What will you do?’

  ‘Dengwi just – she just leapt into action!’ said Pattoo proudly. ‘She looked splendid, her hair flying and her eyes flashing in the unsteady lamplight—’ (You can tell, like me Pattoo had always been one to read stolen novels.)

  Still, Dengwi jumped up on a table and she yelled at everyone that the lords and ladies would probably now kill their servants, and then they’d go after Claidi and kill her and the ‘innocent’ Nemian. (Innocent – hah!) ‘ “Claidi is a heroine,” cried Dengwi,’ said Pattoo, ‘ “she was all alone. But think – together with the slaves, we outnumber the royalty in the House by at least five to one.” ’

  At these explosive words there was uproar.

  ‘It was – fantastic!’ reminisced Pattoo. She lowered her eyes. ‘But frightening.’

  Everyone had immediately run to the slave quarters. No one tried to stay quiet now, they were roaring and screaming, and they’d lit torches (like in the best over-the-top adventure novel) but mostly to see their way in the dark Garden now the moon was down. The torches came in handy too when they met the Hons roaming about, although they were fairly tame, for lions. But anyway Dengwi, now at the front of the Horde, shouted ‘These lions are the sign. We too – are escaped lions!’ Very rousing, naturally.

  Then they marched on the House. (Honestly, there were hundreds of them – us – why had we never thought of this before?)

  When Pattoo and the others told me all this, I wondered if what I heard next would be about a bloodbath.

  We had hated our masters. We’d had every reason. Most were unkind, demanding and uncaring. Many were monsters.

  It was Flamingo who said to me, ‘We didn’t kill anyone, Claidi. I mean, that’s what they would have done to us. So we just wouldn’t.’

  ‘What did you do?’ I must have asked this several times. Or they told me several times.

  Of course, what they did, they Exiled the lords and ladies, the princes and princesses.

  Dengwi said to them, ‘The House is ours now. We know how it works and how to look after ourselves. We’ve been the ones who always kept everything running. It’s you royalty who don’t know how to survive. We’ve had to do it all for you.’

  She told them to get out. Oh yes, I can see her, splendid. All her blackness burning under the torches, and the fire in her eyes. Like a lion, yes.

  The only thing is, I don’t remember her like that. She was always rather quiet and, well, reserved. I suppose it was just the time making her do it, the situation. Strange though, Jizania fixing on her like that. You – what will YOU do—

  Even then, with the birds singing, and everyone so proud, I was thinking, there is more to this …

  However. Only the royals who simply begged to remain were allowed to stay. And they mostly (there were only seventeen) then lived like everyone else. They are allowed to have comfortable rooms, and they can have days off, but that’s like everyone else now, and like everyone else, they too work.

  ‘Lady Iris is a brilliant cook!’ enthused Groother, who was one of the male slaves I’d known to talk to.

  ‘Lady Iris was always all right,’ I agreed.

  Someone said sternly we were both wrong, no one was called lord or lady any more.

  Groother and I both apologized.

  I thought then, and later – constantly – but why aren’t they angry with me? I could have got them all hanged by what I’d (selfishly? Stupidly-unthinkingly) done. But they weren’t angry. They liked me – for making them rebel. I was a symbol, like the lions.

  But, Jizania … She’d said to me, back then, over and over, how she was so old and bored, too tired to do very much. And yet she’d been as much the spark to touch off the powder-keg as anyone. Of course, the royalty of the House had been the ones to kick Twilight, Jizania’s daughter, out, with her beloved Fengrey, because they’d broken the House rules. So maybe Jizania had all that time been nursing this grudge, and then took the opportunity to pay them all out? Then there’s Dengwi. Why had she been so ready to react?

  I’d fallen for Jizania’s act, fallen for a whole lot. Now I just suspected plots behind plots. My experience of the Wolf Tower has taught me to think like this. Perhaps I’m wrong. And perhaps I’m not.

  I wanted to talk to Dengwi.

  ‘And Jizania?’ It was Argul who asked this, lightly. ‘Did she stay on?’

  ‘Oh, she stayed, of course. She’d helped us.’

  ‘All three Old Ladies stayed,’ said Groother. ‘The other two, Corris and Armingat, are useless, but they don’t do any harm. We don’t expect them to work at their age.’

  ‘We all take our turn with the work,’ said Flamingo, virtuously.

  ‘Even the nasty jobs are fine, now we’ve got it all organized.’

  ‘And now no one stands over us with a whip.’

  I keep thinking too of how Nemian and I were still only just outside the walls all that night, because he was too lazy or prince-like to want to move until sunrise. And all that was going on, only a few miles from us. Why hadn’t we heard it? Surely the noise of the shouting, at least some of it, would have carried through that still night – some of the electricity—

  No, we were both too wrapped up in ourselves to hear or sense it. And I’d been wrapped up too in the fact of Nemian, I regret to say, starry-eyed and a fool.

  I could have gone back. That’s the strangest thought. I mean, I could have just gone back to the House and been safe, and had a new life there, free and happy, with everyone-and-thing I knew about me. What would have happened if I’d heard those shouts, seen the lights, been courageous enough to go to see? I would never have met Argul. Nothing would be as it is. Life is – mysterious.

  ‘This is Dengwi’s room.’

  It was impressive. It must have belonged to a prince or princess. More than one room, in fact. All vanilla pillars. There was an ‘antechamber’ with paintings and drapes, and then a satin sitting room, with great big windows, and then a short corridor to the door of Dengwi’s private room.

  Pattoo, who’d brought us, left us in the sitting room, and went and knocked on the door up the corridor.

  ‘Dengwi, are you there?’ we heard her meekly call.

  I’ve said, Dengwi was my friend. I’d thought of her like that. But, too, I didn’t know her that well. Daisy, Pattoo and I had shared a gossipy little bolthole at the Maids’ Hall. Dengwi was in another room, with two other girls. What we had in common was we all served Lady Jade Leaf.

  My last memory of Dengwi was when darling LJL pro
mised to have me whipped professionally – instead of constantly hitting me with her cane that stung and drew blood. ‘You musn’t be whipped,’ Dengwi had insisted to me. ‘My sister was, and – she nearly died.’ I hadn’t known what to say (I’d been paralyzed with terror). Hadn’t even known Dengwi had a sister.

  I suppose Dengwi was always a little, well not standoffish, more aloof. She was very poised, together. When Jade Leaf hit her, as Jade Leaf was always hitting and pinching and kicking all her servants, Dengwi might have been made of steel.

  Now she walked out of her inner room and into this one, and I goggled.

  Then I glanced at Argul. And I saw he was studying Dengwi in quite a new way. He’d been flirty and nice with the other girls, but now his manner altered. He seemed – even more alert.

  She wore a plain white dress. But round her neck was a snake of sculpted gold. She had put back her hair in a gold net. She looked … powerful. And adult. That, I’d say, was always her quality anyway.

  After what had happened, maybe the powerfulness wasn’t surprising either. She’d led a revolution.

  ‘Dengwi,’ said Pattoo, ‘it’s Claidi.’

  Dengwi stood looking long at me. Fine. Was she going to say haughtily, ‘Who is Claidi?’

  ‘And Argul,’ Pattoo explained,’ Claidi’s husband.’

  ‘Shouldn’t that,’ said Dengwi quite softly, ‘be Nemian?’

  All I thought of to do was shake my head.

  How much did people here now know about the Wolf Tower? Perhaps nothing. But Jizania certainly knew things about the Wolf Tower, and there was something between Dengwi and Jizania. Oh yes.

  ‘It’s a long story,’ I added.

  She didn’t seem, as everyone else had, madly pleased to see me. Actually she looked, I thought with sudden dismay, royal.

  Pattoo, the Faultless Hostess, murmured, ‘Claidi has come from Peshamba, a town to the south. It’s very good to see her.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ said Dengwi.

  (They didn’t seem, no one had, dumbstruck at the idea that there were towns and other areas of habitation out in the Waste. So decidedly that had changed, too.)

  ‘Pattoo’s told us,’ Argul said, conversational, ‘about the revolt here. Congratulations on your success.’