Reynaldo cursed and shook himself awake from his staring indecision. “Abandon the roof,” he said. “Wait for them inside the door.”
Dragging Jana along on the leash, Reynaldo herded his men off the ramparts and down to the entrance, where he ordered them into a rough welcoming committee. The best archers formed the front ranks; the rest, armed with their traditional swords and knives, stood behind, ready for the hand-to-hand combat that was most familiar.
My attention was called back to my own immobile body. I had not been able to estimate the duration of my “death” very precisely; I had simply lowered myself into oblivion as quickly and thoroughly as I could safely manage. Now, noise and the telepath’s infallible sense of the presence of others were producing the first stirrings of returning consciousness. The strange taps and thuds that had worried Reynaldo earlier had grown much louder. They came from somewhere nearby, the cellar, perhaps, or the dungeon, directly below my storeroom cell. But through that noise I distinguished another: the familiar sound of a woman’s bare feet on the stairs. It seems I, too, was about to receive visitors.
Michaela slipped quietly through the open door and squatted beside me. Her rage penetrated my reviving spirit like arrows shot at close range. You’ll pay for this, she thought at me, speaking to me in her mind as if she knew I wasn’t dead, as if she knew I could hear her. You ‘Graven think you’ll always win, even in death. But you’ll pay, you soft pretty little cunt who never did any work harder than embroidery or went hungry longer than an hour. Couldn’t survive a day in my place without your lord to protect you. It had all become my fault, that Reynaldo had raped her daughter, that I had exposed her to typhus, that the whole band was about to face an angry avenging ‘Graven army. Michaela was going to do something to redress the imbalance.
She lifted my left wrist, examining the steel bracelet, the gleaming band of smooth metal that, as I had shown her, could not be unlocked or removed. Convinced now that this was so, Michaela drew her knife, a woman’s tool for gathering and trimming firewood and boning meat, and searched for the best place to saw through the wrist bone. Before things became chaotic upstairs, she would make sure not to let this one valuable object slip through her fingers. The thin, worn blade cut a first experimental line in my skin.
I was not yet alive enough to feel pain or true anxiety. There had been no time last night to make more careful plans, to weave a force field of crypta protection around me, or guard against weapons that might test my death more thoroughly than Reynaldo’s kicks. I had not had energy to spare. Dimly I wondered if crypta healing could regenerate something as complicated as a hand.
But the next deep, carving stroke never came. Michaela stopped, transfixed, as the strange sounds overwhelmed her senses—a hammering of metal tools on stone and earth, reverberating in the close room with a tactile dimension that was more than mere noise, as if the walls and floor were vibrating. A clinking, clanging scraping and shoveling, making rapid progress toward where I lay and Michaela crouched, very still now, her knife forgotten in her hand, her eyes no longer on the bracelet but on the small protrusion growing in the dirt floor.
It didn’t matter to me. I knew I must be in some weird hallucinatory state, stranger than the dream cycle of normal sleep, enjoying a foretaste of death’s detachment. So when the protrusion became the blade of an entrenching tool, like a combination of shovel and dagger, and then withdrew to reemerge as a head, I was calm as only the comatose can be. I watched, through Michaela’s staring eyes, although without her paralyzing fear, as the head and shoulders of a man poked up out of the hole he had made.
The mutual startle as the man and the woman locked eyes went through me like a sharp knife through flesh. The man had not expected to see Michaela any more than she had anticipated intruders from underground. Michaela blinked several times, groaned with terror, but decided on action. While the man was still just a head and torso sprouting from the floor, she scuttled over and stabbed at his face.
She had waited just a heartbeat too long. The man had worked both hands loose, and he was armed with a short, triangular-bladed sword as well as his digging tool. He knocked Michaela’s darting hand away in an easy sweeping movement that disguised the strength behind it. Her knife flew out of her grip, traveling in a wide, lazy arc. Before she could flee, he grabbed her by the hair, pulled her backward and cut her throat so deeply she barely gurgled as her life bled away in seconds. The blood sprayed around the room and ran down the walls.
Only now did the rest of the man’s body wriggle free and the entire person appear. A small man, short but barrel-chested, with the huge muscled forearms of a blacksmith. The round little man sighed with the release of tension, wiped his bloody sword on the dead woman’s skirts, and retrieved his shovel-dagger from the floor where he had dropped it. Something caught his eye. He turned the almost severed head face down, exposing the glass comb to full view. He untangled it from the dead woman’s matted hair, working slowly and patiently, shook off a few clinging strands, polished away a drop of blood with a broad thumb, and stood looking down at me and Val.
I was in his mind now, had jumped quickly from the dying Michaela, my eyes still shut, my heartbeat and breathing still undetectable. “Margrave Aranyi!” the man called down the hole, speaking in an unusual dialect. “Your lady it is found I have. But too late it is afraid I am.” The little man was not afraid for himself, only sorry that he had not been able to do better for Dominic. And now, to my astonishment, the familiar distinctive features of my husband appeared from the hole in the ground. He was bareheaded, his coarse dark hair gray with dust from his subterranean journey, his face blackened, partly for camouflage and partly by the soot of the tunnels he had traveled.
Dominic hoisted himself out and stood over me and Val. The little man offered Dominic the comb and he accepted it wordlessly, with only a bowing of his head, before falling to his knees. He scooped my shoulders up in one strong arm and cradled my head to place the comb in my lank hair. Clutching me to his chest, Dominic rocked me back and forth, keening softly under his breath. The sound grew to become a moan, then a cry. Finally the cries broke free into the most glorious and heartrending noise I have ever heard in my life.
My husband, for the first and only time, sang to me. He sang a lament, a dirge, the mourning of a lover for his lost beloved. It was not in Eclipsian, certainly not in Terran, nor in the convoluted speech of the little man who had found me. But I knew it for what it was, as a telepath can understand clear thoughts in any language. Beloved of my heart, reflection of my soul, without you I am but half myself. The thoughts formed in my head as Dominic chanted the words in a music that was like a clear stream flowing over smooth stones.
My husband’s deep voice resonated with the strange song and, as my consciousness slowly reformed, I felt the fluttering in my stomach that accompanies any experience of aching, emotional beauty. My hair seemed to rise from my scalp with the unearthly wonder of the sound. My heart was inspired to beat faster and my breathing sped up to accommodate the greater flow of blood. Dominic’s song brought me back from death, accelerating the process, so that what should have taken hours was accomplished too quickly, in minutes.
Once Dominic felt my active presence he stopped his singing abruptly. If I was awake to hear it, I could no longer be privileged to enjoy the forbidden pleasure.
Back in my own mind again, I thought to Dominic. Don’t mourn me yet, my love, I said. You see I am not gone, but only in the crypta-death. I spent my entire new store of strength in one mighty effort and lifted a hand, my left, the tiny gas jet of my inner flame wavering out its last flickers of electricity, the red line where Michaela had cut me dripping the first beads of the blood that was just beginning to flow. I rubbed my husband’s smudged cheek with my knuckles.
Dominic moved his head an inch to kiss the back of my hand. “Yes, Amalie, my dearest, my lady wife,” he said, his voice still musical with grief, “I know. But—oh, gods—to see you like this—�
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I touched his lips again, silencing the rest of the thought. “I understand,” I whispered in speech, loosening my jaws from the rictus of imitation death. He had seen the inevitable future, half a century from now, the old woman who would almost certainly predecease such a vigorous and strong husband, and he had mourned that wife of fifty years of marriage, as he might not have the strength or the will to do then.
There was no more time to indulge in emotion. Dominic looked from me to Val. “Jana?” he asked. He knew before I told him, was on his feet, his sword drawn, before I could speak or even think the word, “Reynaldo.”
While Dominic had mourned me, a whole platoon of the short, thickset men had climbed out of their tunnel into my cell. “One of you guard ‘Gravina Aranyi,” Dominic said, not looking back to see his words obeyed as he dashed up the stairs to rescue his daughter. “The rest, follow me.” The men stared at each other in consternation. They were here for glory and booty, not to stay in some filthy cell with an unconscious woman and child.
Bickering in their strange language, they picked up straws from the pallet. The loser with the short one gave a bitter laugh, resigning himself to a profitless day, and settled in beside me on the floor. “Lucky for you my lady it is,” he said, making conversation, “that your husband wealth us promised, or else that worked glass in your hair mine would be.” He was not really threatening; he knew Dominic’s power too well. It was his form of pleasantry, and he carried out his unwelcome commission faithfully.
I studied my reluctant friend through newly-opened eyes that saw clearly in the cell’s gloom. Like the others, he was short and thick. The tallest of them was little taller than me, and I am small even for a woman. Yet any one of them would make three of me around, all muscle and bone, not fat. I could whisper now. “Miners?” I asked.
The man nodded confirmation. “Your lord husband,” he said, “well he speaks.” He smiled, remembering Dominic’s powers of persuasion. “Great reward to us he offered if the way below ground to the castle find we could.”
The blacksmiths and metalworkers are also miners, controlling every stage of production, from ore to forged steel. If Dominic had decided that tunneling into the castle was the surest way of effecting a rescue, they were a logical choice for guides. But they had been the ‘Graven’s, and Dominic’s, enemies just six years ago, during a failed rebellion, manipulated by the ringleaders into allowing the misuse of a dangerous telepathic weapon in their safekeeping. Miners are not warriors, and Dominic’s troops had mowed them down like unarmed civilians, despite their heavy hammers and pickaxes. My husband had told me about it, embarrassed at the gruesome ease of the massacre, shaking his head and admitting that the fear of the weapon’s power had made him press on long after he would have stopped such slaughter in an ordinary battle.
I looked fearfully at the man. They have no crypta that I can sense, but my thoughts would be easy for him to guess. “Your lord,” he told me with a smirk, “greatly you he loves. Land to us he pledged. Bandits to kill, border to guard. For what six years ago he did, Aranyi-holding for settlement he offers.”
Dominic had offered them the northern border slice of sparsely inhabited Aranyi land, the man explained, to provide a buffer zone against bandits or other incursions. The common enemy had made an uneasy peace between Aranyi and the ironworkers; the cost to us in property was as nothing compared to the rescue and the future safety it would bring.
My guard was prepared to chatter on all day. His singsong voice, turned-around sentences chasing their tails in my head, faded to background noise. The sound of battle took its place.
CHAPTER 15
I was running, racing through the great hall, my sword in my hand, my eyes measuring the distance to where I should shout. No, not I. Dominic. I had maintained communion with him from when he held me and sang. His touch has always bound us, one to the other, mind to mind, as the scars of our marriage brands bind us in law.
For the rest of the battle, I lived it through Dominic’s mind, as if I were there—as I was, in his perceptions. Never before or since have I experienced such a thing, and I would not wish to again. But I am glad, having read so much of battles, mythical and historical, Terran and Eclipsian, to have seen, briefly and on a small scale, what it is like. Dominic was the perfect window into this foreign world, for he thinks as he fights, judging situations and making decisions with almost mathematical clarity, so that later, when I was me again, the memories only at secondhand, I could yet understand what I– we– he– had done.
As Dominic reached the top of the stairs, the bandits were braced to inflict a real defeat on the Aranyi forces, which were about to break down the wooden doors. Our men would burst through, thinking the battle all but won, to be met with a hail of arrows shot at close range, and a follow-up of swordsmen to slice through the survivors. Timed perfectly, it could be as devastating as Reynaldo’s original plan.
Dominic took in the whole problem as he ran, covering the distance to the rear ranks of his enemies quickly. His new allies, the miners, followed after a slight lag, Dominic’s long legs and light frame allowing him to move at a speed they could not match.
Run and shout, I– Dominic– we– thought, to get their attention. Make the archers turn around, that is the important thing, but don’t become a target. Always taller than other men, the alien blood that shines through the eyes, that made the bones grow long and light. Slouch a little, reaching the rear rows of the swordsman bandits, but shout– “Aranyi! Aranyi!”
Dominic’s battle cry booms out of his chest and nose simultaneously, a deep rumble with a reedy overtone like monks chanting several octaves apart, a choir of men in one body. The trumpet shall sound, I sang to myself as the vocalization diffused in my resurrecting flesh like the flowering of orgasm. Surely the bandits would lay down their weapons at such an ultimatum. I had this one last solitary thought before communion subsumed my individuality. Nobody would oppose the last trumpet with violence. But Dominic knew, as I would learn, the bandits had not my ear for music.
“Aranyi!” Dominic shouts again. They’ll hear that all right, will turn to face it in the fear reflex. Won’t have to stab the swordsmen from behind like a hired assassin. Not that it matters. This is war, for all our small numbers, not a duel of honor. Must make a dent in the back rows, so the archers will turn from the door. Several pivot as I approach.
Think to Niall. Beloved, not yet. Don’t burst in to a face full of arrows, beloved. Wait until I tell you.
Hear the answer, always slightly ironic, even in this desperate moment: Not a minute too early, my love, thank you. The boards are splintering. Much too sophisticated for nineteen. He will be a dangerous man in a few years. Like me. Too much like me. He will not stay long with me and mine.
The ram stops its work. Now let my blade find its true place, the neck, the arm. The sword will find it, not through any magic, as some claim, or crypta, but because I have trained and worked so that it comes naturally. One, two, three—now the sword has tasted four of them, now they know me.
There is a heaving and twisting in the ranks of the bandits. The men in the rear, armed with the usual swords and knives, turn to fight me and my allies. The bandits in the front, holding armed bows at the soon to be rammed door, are standing indecisive between the expected assault on the door and the new, real, attack behind. Men push against each other in panic, either to fight the surprise attack or to flee.
The killing red rises in my eyes. The sword makes a humming sound as it whirls through the air. The dagger I hold close at my side. There are dead and wounded around me, no more dare approach. Take the chance to scan the ranks and the surroundings in a full circle. Still none behind me, only the scum in front, twisting this way and that, unsure whether to continue to guard the door or join the fight back here.
The miners and the smiths are really fighting, not just shouting and waving their weapons. They’re new to organized combat, but enthusiastic, more like butchers than swor
dsmen. Their short, brutal blades hack at the enemy, working like cleavers, chopping off a hand or disemboweling. I have taught them something after all in two days, or maybe it’s the promise of virgin land that may hold iron ore. For whatever reason, they’re proving their worth. That’s one gamble that paid off.
The archers have turned at last, throwing down their bows and drawing their swords. Can’t shoot over the heads of their own men and expect to hit us. Too many on their own side fallen to wait for the besiegers. It’s all hand-to-hand now.
Think to Niall again: Now, beloved, now we’re ready for you.
The ram thuds against the door again, once, twice. They’re in. Niall has remembered everything. All of our men, in helmet band or collar, are wearing the purple flower, the mountain iris that grows abundantly on Aranyi land. Can’t afford to wonder if the man next to you is a bandit in a stolen uniform.
The guards who were shamed, who let them take Amalie, are in the front, at their own request. Better to fall in the first assault than live with that dishonor forever weighing heavy on the soul. Although what they could have done, outnumbered as they were… Still, it’s what we’re taught, what makes us soldiers.
You did well, beloved. How young he looks, and tired. His eyes meet mine over the heads of the enemy. He’s tall, almost as tall as me, a perfect match. Beloved companion. We will meet in the middle.
Niall shouts a blood-curdling, ululating battle cry, a Galloway highland paean, and seems to hang in the air as he leaps into action, twirling his rapier. An archer, stunned by the sound, freezes for a fatal moment and doubles over as Niall stabs him through the guts, withdraws the blade, kicks the body aside and parries the attack of a bandit swordsman.
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