Two of the camp's three pimps, as well as Sugarman, had elected to stay with Zane, but a number of their whores, both women and boys, were trying to join Ari; and, as if there weren't enough arguments already, assorted slaves and concubines of men on each side were trying to join the other. More of the curse? Starhawk thought, glancing at the cliffs where the canyon of the Gore narrowed upstream and where she thought she'd seen the brown, watching shadows of the Gore Thane's men.
Then Zane had come from the direction of the barges, dragging the dancer Opium by the hair.
He had hold of her wrists in one hand. She was struggling, half bent-over and unable to straighten from the pain of his grip; by the bruise on her face, he'd struck her already. His own face was so swollen and scabbed from his beating by Ari it was hard to tell whether she'd gotten him with her nails or not. She was sobbing "NO! NO!" Tears of fury were running down her cheeks. Penpusher and Dogbreath, hurrying past with a couple of mules on lead, checked their stride a moment, but then went on toward the ferries as fast as they could. Women, after all, do not pull wagons. Starhawk was starting to rise, sword in hand, when she felt Sun Wolf's bulk shadow the doorway at her back.
"Let her go, Zane."
Zane started to drag her in another direction. Starhawk easily headed him off. He swung back toward the Wolf, his face a mask of purpled, puffy rage. "The hell I will! You and your nancy-boy Ari aren't going to take all the skirts around here worth lifting ... "
Men started at once to gather-Louth and a mutineer named Pinky, the Big Thurg, Goddess, Cat-Dirt, and another man whose affiliation she didn't remember ... There was a mutter of assent. Sun Wolf stepped forward out of the tent.
"She's a free woman, Zane." His face had a drawn look to it in the faded frame of his lion-colored hair. Even in a few hours, fatigue-lines had printed themselves like chisel cuts in the corner of his single eye. "She's got the right to choose."
"Rot that and rot you!" Zane's voice was thick with rage and with sinuses swollen shut. "We need women, not just those scabby sluts you're leaving us with! We have a right to take them!"
Sun Wolf covered the distance between them with no evidence of hurry, arms at his sides, his bite-scarred, gold-furred hands empty. "Why?" he asked mildly. "You thinking you're not going to take that fort after all and have the women from it?"
Zane stepped back from him, twisting brutally at the glossy tangle of Opium's curls and keeping an effortless grip on both slim brown wrists. Blood and spit flecked from his broken teeth as he spoke. "We'll take it, all right. You let it be, Wolf." He moved to turn away, but Sun Wolf was before him, again stepping easily while Zane's movements were hampered by the woman he held.
"Zane," the Wolf said affably, though his eye glittered with dangerous fire, "if you had any brains, I'd suspect you were stalling until the river could rise so Ari would have no choice but to join you in that witless attack."
The blue eyes shifted, the puffed lips pulled back like an animal's.
"I'm not sure you're smart enough to think of something like that, but if you did, I'm telling you now it'd be a stupid trick to pull."
"Not as stupid as the trick you're pulling!" Shrillness skinned Zane's voice. "This is twice you've left us in the lurch, with all your big talk about magic! I have yet to see you charm warts, O Mighty Sorcerer! What's the matter, you want this bitch yourself, as a change from Ari?" He twisted her hair again, smiling just a little at her sobbing cry.
Ari had just come up, the Little Thurg and Battlesow at his heels; Starhawk saw the twitch of his hand toward his sword hilt, but too many of Zane's men were in the increasing mob around them. If Ari attacked this time it would not be single combat.
"What?" the Wolf said, with deadly geniality in his cracked voice. "Don't think you can take the fort yourselves? Think you need a little magic to help you out?"
"NO!" Zane spat instantly. "We can take anything, win anything, without any goddam hoodoos using magic for what they haven't got the juice to do like real men! You're the one who needs magic, old man, to make up for what you haven't got any more on your own! Go on, take your boy and whoever else you can get to follow you for old time's sake and go die in the wastelands! We'll send a couple of sutlers out to look for your bones in the spring! Go on, get out!" He grinned crookedly through swollen lips. "Or you gonna do a little hocus-pocus on us before you leave, just to teach us a lesson?"
"Zane." Sun Wolf sighed patiently. "You couldn't learn a lesson-you couldn't learn your own name if Helmpiddle wrote it on your back."
Rage flared the blue eyes and Zane's hands went for his sword, exactly, Starhawk suspected, as the Wolf had intended. Released, Opium twisted and was gone into the crowd. Zane took a step after her, but Starhawk and the Goddess-who must have weighed one-eighty without armor-were suddenly blocking his way.
Later, loading the ferries in the slanting rain, Starhawk got a glimpse of Opium's striped silk dress under Gully the Bard's filthy green coat and hood, being loaded by Bron into the barge. Bron, a slender, unobtrusive man with prematurely gray hair, was nobody's idea of a knight errant, but, the Hawk supposed, damsels in distress had to take it where they could. She knew the tavern keeper well enough to know he wasn't going to exact payment for his protection in kind. However much he might want to, she added to herself, catching a glimpse of a slim brown leg.
She and Sun Wolf were among the last to cross, guarding the dwindling piles of supplies against the possibility of Zane changing his mind. The river was rising fast, white and vicious over the drowned black rocks as their barge was hauled across. Dun and blue, the twisted sandstone cliffs reared over them like the potholed scales of a monster's corpse, clouds mantling their broken sky line-water the color of wheat hulls churned and tore at their feet. Clinging to the gunwales and hearing the scrape of those rocks on the wood beneath her feet, Starhawk wondered abstractly if, after all this trouble, she was simply going to be drowned.
That would be typical, she thought dourly, glancing up at Sun Wolf's set face, drenched with spray and rain, and fought the childish impulse to cling to him instead of to the side of the boat. She wondered academically whether the curse would divide itself, or remain with one group or the other.
But if the curse had divided, its strength was undiminished; and if it had selected one group, it speedily became obvious which.
Flayed by bitter rain that was never quite cold enough to freeze the sticky yellow-gray mud that seemed to be everywhere in the low ground, lashed by the winds, if they climbed to the bony ridges from which all fertility had long since eroded away, the troop had slowed to a crawl. What had once been the main road from Gwenth to its northern capital at Wrynde had been in decay for years, but now only a rutted track remained, new gullies cutting it every mile or so in the drowning rains. Brambles and the broken-off spears of seedling pine filled these crevasses, tangling wheels and the feet of men and beasts or covering over gaps and potholes until it was too late to avoid them. Twice wolves and once bandits emerged from the dark knots of forest and thicket to attack the train, taking their toll in livestock, injuries, and sheer exhaustion. Mold and spoilage cut rations still further, even as a thousand delays, great and small, stretched what should have been ten days' journey into nearly a month, and what food there was, despite Hog's best efforts, could be termed edible only by comparison. No wonder, Starhawk thought, huddling by night over a smoky brazier of damp coals in Bron's tavern, people have been ready to kill each other after a summer of this. She was ready to garrote Gully, if he sang the Lay of Naxis and Salopina one more time.
Across the table from her, Dogbreath was dispiritedly laying out a hand of solitaire. Few people had the energy to play poker these days, even had anybody been able to win more than a few bits at it. During the siege, Bron had forbidden the game in his tavern as the cause of too many fights; but, looking around her at the weary men, muddy to the eyebrows and too exhausted even to avoid the rain dripping on them from the sagging tent roof, the Hawk doubted
many of them had the spunk to fight these days.
Probably just as well.
A sharp riffle of voices broke into the numbed buzz of the general noise, and she saw men crowding in a jostling knot by the entrance, gesturing in anger and disgust. The noise level of the benches all around her was such that she couldn't hear what the problem was. She was almost afraid to guess.
A moment later, she saw Moggin detach himself from the press and edge his way cautiously toward her, a boiled-leather mug of skink-water-hot gin and tea-in either hand. A week or so ago, some of the men might have moved away in sullen distrust, but by now no one cared whether he'd been a wizard or a slave.
"Yo, Moggy," she greeted him in mercenary cant.
"And a pleasant yo to yourself, Warlady." He handed her the mug.
Moggin looked tired-worse, in some ways, than he had the night they'd taken him away from Zane. Without complaint, he did his share of the work in setting and striking Dogbreath's overcrowded tent, in loading mules, or levering wagons from slime holes; though he still wore the slave chain, none of the others in the tent-Dogbreath, Firecat, Penpusher, Sun Wolf, Starhawk-regarded him as other than a partner in the hellish business of getting out of the current mess alive. But looking at him now, Starhawk could see how badly the exertion was telling on him.
He was not, as they were, a trained warrior, inured to hardship. Beneath the baggy assortment of borrowed garments-a pair of Starhawk's spare breeches, Bron's second-best jerkin, and shirts taken by Butcher from the bodies of the dead-he was losing flesh; under his unfailing gentle courtesy, she sensed exhaustion and the strain of merely keeping on his feet and keeping up with the train from day to day.
She nodded toward the door. "Dare I ask?"
"The scouting party is back from the Buttonwillow settlement where Ari meant to restock ... " Moggin broke off in a fit of coughing, deep and ropy and harsh, from the bottom of his lungs. Then he went on, "They found it burned out and deserted, evidently by bandits."
"Why am I not surprised?" Starhawk took a sip of the liquescent nastiness in the cup. At least it was warming, which the coals in the brazier nearby definitely were not. "I'm really not surprised," she added, without irony this time. "That settlement and its farms have been hanging on by their teeth and toenails for the last forty years. Ari tells me the land was exhausted, and I know for a fact they got raided about twice a year, once by us and once by bandits ... But it would be now that the ax falls."
"The scouts said it appeared to have happened six weeks ago."
"That counts as 'now.' "
A few tables away, amid whoops of audience laughter, Gully was on his knees attempting to lick out the gin Curly Bear had poured into the hole of his mandolin. Though Starhawk had a good deal of sympathy for Curly Bear's feelings-she was ready to kill the little bard if he whined at her for a drink again-she sighed disgustedly, and called out, "Oh, come on, you want that thing to sound even worse than it does already?" She pitched a copper at Gully's feet. "Get yourself some gin and drink it real slow in that corner over there and don't make a sound." She'd planned to have a second round herself, but, she thought, what the hell? In any case the stuff was vile enough to engender a certain amount of pity for anyone who had to have it, as Gully did.
The bard bowed to her with a flourish, gin dripping from his mandolin. "Warlady, I shall commemorate your generosity with a ballad in your honor ... "
With a shudder, she turned back to Moggin, while the Bear and his boyfriends fell on each other laughing and improvised on the theme of Gully's commemorative ballads. "I don't know whether that poor little sap being here is his bad luck or ours. For that matter ... " She paused while Moggin coughed again and sipped gingerly at his drink. " ... could the hoodoo be someone in the camp? Not one of the slaves from Vorsal, but someone who's been here all along? Someone who came in with last summer's campaign, maybe ... "
"Nix." Dogbreath looked up from his solitaire with bright, demented eyes. "First week under the walls, I won fifty bits strat off Zane at poker. Now, you know what? I've been dealing poker hands and shooting dice against myself for two weeks, and have gotten zippe-roonie, zero-hell, the only way I've been able to win at solitaire is to cheat."
"Which seems to indicate," Moggin said thoughtfully, "that what's operating is completely automatic. If the curse were placed on the troop for vengeance, as I suspect it was, there would be no need for the wizard to follow and see it done."
"Vengeance for what!" demanded Dogbreath, genuinely indignant, and Starhawk kicked him under the table. "Wait a minute, it isn't us who start the wars. That's like putting a knife on trial for murder." And, when Starhawk raised one dark brow ironically: "Or a knife on trial for being a knife."
"You have a point," Moggin agreed, evidently willing to argue the matter on philosophical grounds. "But just because a man-or woman-is a wizard, doesn't mean he or she is a determinist philosopher, or even particularly rational. Men kill not only the messenger who brings them bad news, but also the horse he rode in on. It may not be fair, but it does relieve one's feelings."
"But by the same token," Starhawk said, "slapping a curse on the camp might do the job; but, if I was out for vengeance, I'd sure as hell want to relieve my feelings by coming along to spit on the last man as he died. The Chief's been all over this camp with that auligar of Drosis'. He says he's found the slime, the touch, of the hex everywhere, but not so much as a single Eye on any wagon, tent, box, or bale. And don't forget that someone tried to enslave him back in Vorsal and, when that didn't work, sent the djerkas to skrag him. Does that sound like straight vengeance?"
"It might," Moggin said quietly, "if it is vengeance against him that this other mage seeks. Where is he, by the way?"
"At Butcher's," the Hawk said, her voice suddenly very small, turning her face away to look into the dull glow of the brazier's coals.
Sun Wolf came out of the hospital tent moving slowly, stiffly, like an old man. And like an old man or like a University doctor or scholar, he wore a long robe thrown on over the red pig-leather of his doublet-a robe mostly in rags, but fur-lined and the warmest thing he could find-and it billowed heavily around him with the cold gusts that snatched at his hair as he stood, arms folded, staring out into the wet hell of darkness and pattering rain. Was he old? he wondered, with the detached disinterest he had frequently experienced in his times of greatest peril. He certainly felt old. Old, and very helpless.
He understood that working the weather in winter was a futile task at best. In putting forth all his strength to turn aside wind and rain, he never knew whether the storms that drenched them, the winds that scoured them, the cold that deepened nightly, were less cruel than they would otherwise have been. He could only repeat the spells, evening after evening when the train stopped after sometimes as little as five miles, and hope.
No rest, no time, not even time to quiz Moggin on the contents of Drosis' spell books beyond what was absolutely necessary for this endless, hated round of healing and weather-weaving. After two weeks, the drain on his overstretched powers was beginning to nauseate him, as if the power that he put out to save them was cut from his own flesh, drained from his veins.
He closed his right eye, feeling the leather patch twitch with the drawing-down of the long, curled shelf of his brow. Clouds moved swiftly in a low roof overhead, surging around the swell of the moor on all sides in the leaden dark. The heart-piercing wildness of the rain smell filled him, the rising cold must of earth, and the scents of wind and freedom and stone. They were all but buried in the stink of the camp, the stench of privies and sweat and, from the tent behind him, clinging to the folds of his patched mantle and the leather of his sleeves, the other stinks he hated-mortifying flesh in wounds that refused to heal, scorched herbs, draughts that had no effect on the nameless fevers that had begun to wander the camp like the Gray Women of fireside legend, carrying off whom they would.
Dimly he could hear Ari talking to Butcher in the deeps of the tent whi
le she bandaged, once again, the still-open wound Zane had left on his arm. Dammit, that arm should be smooth as a baby's bottom by this time! He had worked healing spells over it daily, putting his powers into it as he had put them into the mule-wrangler's boy who had died last night of fever, the sutler's slave whose arm, severed in a freak accident with one of the wagons, had mortified in spite of all he could do, and the camp follower who had died tonight bearing a son who would have to be drowned, for it could not survive the journey yet ahead of them to Wrynde. He could feel the power draining out of him, knowing that tonight's brief rest would be no more sufficient to restore it than last night's had been, or the night before.
But having saved Starhawk, he could not turn his back on these others. Every time he touched Ari's arm to work the healing-magic that seemed to have no effect, he could feel the rot there, gangrene waiting like a black syrup just beneath the skin. The day he quit pouring his strength into those spells, the wound would turn like fruit in the tropic summer.
And everywhere he felt the hex. With his eyes closed, it was as if he could see the camp still in the darkness, glowing under the rain like putrid fish.
Feet plashed softly in the puddles. Too late, he smelled a familiar perfume. Not now, he thought, blindly, wearily. God's grandmother, I'm too tired to deal with this now. Go away, damn you, woman ...
But in spite of his weariness his palms warmed with the memory of her flesh.
"You've been avoiding me."
In a train of two thousand people it hadn't been easy. Opening his eye, he saw her where the shadows lay blackest, her cloak belling like smoke in the fitful wind, and the edge of the tent's grimy light catching a flame echo of orange from her striped dress beneath. Rain whispered unnoticed around them like the murmur of wind in the coarse heather.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "I have."
She took a step nearer to him and he backed a step away, ducking behind a guy rope, not wanting to come near enough to her to touch her, for fear that he might. "Aren't you going to let me thank you for rescuing me from Zane?" From beneath her cloak her hands, small and brown like a little orange seller's, emerged to rest on the rope that stretched between them. Poor food and physical strain brought out the fragile wildness of her face, deepening his own need to protect and shield. It would be so easy to cup that delicate chin, touch the childish hollow beneath the cheekbone ... The rain sprinkled her magnificent hair with diamonds in the frame of her hood; for a moment, his hands shaped the thought of warmed gold and the prickle of the jewels that decorated her bodice clasps.
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