“I came as soon as I heard. Skander, I am coming with you. Also Ewing and Aelfhorn and their men come.”
“Nay, now I am jealous.” The mockery had warmed the embers of Dammerung’s voice. “You will not miss me!”
Within half an hour the columns were assembled and on the move, salutes flung across the intervening spaces, and Margaret, who had long ago grown used to how quickly camps were packed and unpacked, stood beside Dammerung watching Skander’s blue banner dwindle into the purple thunder of the air on the shore of Holywood, a small panic under her heart which she was trying desperately to crush as one crushes out the life of a small broken bird for whom death is the only mercy.
“It is Orzelon-gang for us,” said the War-wolf, “and the relief of the Dragon-lord of the North. And do not tell anyone,” he added, “but there is not a worse hour for me to lose Skander Rime, the Fighting Dog of Plenilune.”
She set her hand on his shoulder and pressed hard with her fingers until his leather harness cut her; his face gashed sideways with a smile. That was all: they turned together to pack their own things and fill their faces with the familiar dust of the open road and the ominous glare of summer thunder on the horizon which was the colour of hard crimson, the colour of the hour.
Out from under her foreboding rose the latent curiosity, born in her months ago, to see Orzelon-gang’s mighty palace. The storm did not break. It hung in a heavy tabby-skin of purple and gold and scarlet overhead, racing across the sky with gale winds but never dispersed, and under its rich gloom, having crossed nearly every Honour in Plenilune, Margaret saw Mark Roy’s palace.
It was a city in itself, settled in a little lift of a valley at the bend of a wide, navigable river. With the angry golden sunset-sky behind it, it was a dream-silhouette of black spires and shadowed towers, gilt-edged banners and sable walls: a piece of imagery that had got lost and wandered from the old medieval poetry Margaret had once known on the other side of many bright, black turnings in life. For a moment, on the lift of the track where there were no trees and only wind and the sudden, stinging glory of the landscape, she caught Plenilune off guard—or did it catch her?—and she saw the life that beat beneath all small, mundane things sketched for that instant in the indomitable blackness of Orzelon-gang’s walls—awful, half-checked, unreckoned, unreal.
“He stands directly in our way.”
Aikin’s bitter voice broke through her swimming agony. She tore her gaze from the city and saw the haze of many cooking-fires lying over the valley; between them and the stronghold, all across the way, were Rupert’s forces. On the riverbank she could just make out the glint of the Standards all in array: the tent nearest them would be Rupert’s.
“He has been busy,” she said coldly, “in the time that Skander has been mending.”
“A week and a half, little more,” said Dammerung. “In war, time is of the very essence of victory.”
Aikin Ironside’s face was hammered out of bronze in the late light. “Do we go down now, sir?”
“At once. Margaret, keep by me—you have your steel? That is good—”
He spoke something more to Aikin and the others behind him; with a great show of heels and sun-shot spear-points, flowing crests and rush of muscle they dispersed along the line. But Margaret did not notice them. She felt them move as she felt Mausoleum shift and clench beneath her, but she did not see them. She was listening in shame to the singing in her ears and wishing she felt angry at Rupert and not so white and cold. Dammerung caught her eye.
“Me?” she asked, for that was all she needed to ask.
He smiled sympathetically. “There is not a safer place in Plenilune. I daren’t leave you behind. And look—Grane and Black Malkin go out in battle-array. Come along, renegade heart. Fly under my shadow and you’ll do fine today.
“Huw,” he added to the man on his left, “give me a loud halloo on the horn to wake them.”
The moon-curve of the horn went up; the man drew in a powerful breath. In that thick twilight Margaret could almost see the sound swelling, an enormous golden belling, brazen, turning scarlet; the ripples of it went out and came back to them over the land.
A momentary silence. Then, from the lower lands, another sound went up in answer: a yelping in defiance, once, twice. The challenge had been accepted.
Dammerung snapped his fingers. The horn was dropped and the swords sang out. Margaret felt clammy inside her own leather harness, but she gamely rolled back the folds of her teal-stained cloak and laid her own sword bare in her hand. It was not much more than a short sword, and not very effective for cavalry work, but it would be heavy by the time she was done wielding it and it would be enough, she hoped, to poke a hole in the life of anyone who came near her.
The War-wolf, barefoot, bareheaded, put his gauntleted hands over his mouth and screamed like a falcon in the dive so that even Margaret felt the blood rush into her face and the hair on her neck stand on end…
…Dammerung struck her cheek with the flat of his hand, jolting her upright. His eyes were dancing in a bloodied face. “Are you still with me?”
She caught the words by watching his lips. Beside them a horse was going down in a welter of blood and muck, screaming like a child. She staggered forward and yanked her messy blade out of a dead soldier’s body where she had put it a minute, two minutes before.
Three war-lords, two of whom she vaguely recognized—the rank of the last she knew only from the sight of his spurs—broke at them from the rest of the press. Her shoulder collided with Dammerung’s. Side by side, blades pulled back at full, they careened recklessly into the steel embrace waiting for them. Margaret felt the shock and bone-tingle as her sword sheared along metal. The war-lord’s sword sketched a martyr’s ring above her, bisected briefly, in a streak of black blood, by the flying head of the next war-lord as Dammerung cut it cleanly from the neck. With a wrenching twist she got her sword free of the other’s hilt and ran it up into the craggy, concentrated face. Something bit her in the shoulder—not bad, not enough to sway her, but enough to make her curious—but at that moment her foot was slipping on a patch of blood, and she had to fling herself mightily forward into the plunge and she bore the body over without any grace, her sword pulling out of her hands as it fell.
A hand—Dammerung’s hand—collared her and flung her to the ground nearly up to her elbows in the muck. Not a safer place in Plenilune? she thought with irony. With one mucky hand she pushed back her hair and looked up through a haze of glorying sunset as Dammerung and Aikin—where had he come from?—cleared a space around them. They were nearly under the doors of the palace. Looking over her shoulder, Margaret could see them rising above her, doors fist to fist, the squared shoulders of the rampart towers set firmly against the besieging army.
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 w
ith 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.
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