The Ladies of Mandrigyn

by Barbara Hambly

  He gave himself a little shove with his shoulder against the doorframe and walked to where she stood before them in that aura of candle flame, flamelike herself in her golden gown. At this movement, she turned her head, surprised. Maybe she didn’t think I’d speak, he thought, with a prickle of anger at that certainty of hers. He turned to the devouring sea of eyes.

  “What Sheera says is true,” he agreed quietly, the gravelly rumble of his voice pitched, as a leader must know how to pitch it, to the size of his troop. “A woman fighting for her children—or occasionally for a man—will fight like a cornered rat. But I’ve driven rats into corners and killed them with the toe of my boot, and don’t think that can’t happen to you.”

  Sheera swung around, the whole of her body glittering with rage. He caught her gaze and silenced her, as if he had laid a hand over her mouth. After a moment, his eyes returned to the women.

  “So all right, I agreed to teach you, to make warriors out of you; and by the spirits of my ancestors, I’ll do it, if I have to break your necks. But I want you all to understand what it is you’re doing.

  “War is serious. War is dead serious. You are all smaller, lighter, and slower on the run than men. If you expect to beat men in combat, you had damned well better be twice as good as they are. I can make you twice as good. That’s my job. But in the process, you’re going to get cut up, you’re going to get hurt, you’re going to get shouted at and cursed, and you’ll crawl home so exhausted you can hardly stand up, because that’s the only way to get good, especially if you’re little enough for some man to lift and carry away under his arm.” His eyes picked the diminutive Gilden Shorad out of the crowd and met a hard, challenging, sea-blue stare.

  “So if you don’t think you can finish the race, don’t waste my time by starting it. Whenever I get a batch of new recruits, I end up shaking out about half of them, anyway. You don’t have to be tough to start—I’ll make you tough. But you have to stay with it. And you have to be committed to killing people and maybe losing a limb or losing your life. That’s war.”

  His eyes raked them, gleaming like a gold beast’s in the dimness: the whores, sweet as all the spices of the East with their curled hair and painted eyes; the brown laborer women, prematurely old, like bundles of dowdy serge; the wives of merchants, now many of them merchants themselves, soft and well cared for in their lace and jewels.

  “You decide if you can do it or not,” he said quietly. “I want my corps here tomorrow night at this time. That’s all.”

  He turned and met Sheera’s eyes. Under her lowered lids he could see the speculation, the curiosity and reevaluation, as if she were wondering what she had brought to Mandrigyn.

  Chapter 6

  “THIS IS A SWORD,” Sun Wolf said. “You hold it by this end.”

  He glared at the dozen women who stood in a line before him, all of them wheezing with the exertion of an hour of warming-up and tumbling exercises that had convinced them, as well as their instructor, that they’d never be warriors.

  “You.” He pointed to Gilden Shorad’s partner-in-crime, the tiny, fragile-looking Wilarne M’Tree. She stepped forward, bright, black eyes raised trustingly to his, and he tossed the weapon to her hilt-first. She fielded it, but he saw by the way she caught herself that it was heavier than she’d been ready for.

  He held out his hand and snapped his fingers. She threw it back awkwardly. He plucked it out of the air with no visible effort.

  “You’re going to be working with weighted weapons,” he told them, as he’d told the two groups he had worked with last night and would tell another group later on tonight. “That’s the only way you can build up the strength in your arms.”

  One of the women protested, “But I thought we—”

  He whirled on her. “You ask for permission to speak!” he snapped.

  Her face reddened angrily. She was a tall, piquant-faced woman with the red-gold hair of a highlander, her breasts small under their leather binding, her legs rather knock-kneed in her short linen drawers, the marks of past pregnancies printed on the muscleless white flesh of her belly. After a moment, she said in a stifled tone, “Permission to speak, sir.”

  “Permission granted,” he growled.

  Permission to speak, he had found, was one of the best ways to break the first rush of hasty words. Most recruits didn’t know what they were talking about, anyway.

  It worked in this case. Her first outburst checked, the woman spoke in sullenness rather than in outrage. “I thought we were training for a—a surprise attack. A sneak attack.”

  “You are,” Sun Wolf said calmly. “But if something goes wrong, or if you’re trapped, you may have to take on a man with a sword—or several men, for that matter. You may have to hold off attackers from the rest of the party or maintain a key position while the others go on. You won’t just be fighting for your own life then, you’ll be fighting for everybody’s.”

  The woman stepped back, blushing hotly and greatly discomfited. With instinctive tact, the Wolf turned to the other women. “That goes for all of you,” he told them gruffly. “And for anything I teach. I was hired because I’m a warrior—I know what you’re going to run up against. Believe me, everything I teach you has a purpose, no matter how pointless it seems. I can’t take the time to explain it to you. Do you understand?”

  Cowed, they nodded.

  He bellowed at them, “Don’t just stand there bobbing your heads up and down! I can’t hear your brains rattle at this distance! Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” Gilden and Wilarne hastened to reply.

  He glared at the group of them. “What?”

  All of them chorused this time. “Yes, sir.”

  He nodded brusquely. “Good.” He jerked his thumb at the weapons that lay amid a pile of sacking in one corner of the dimly lighted orangery. “There are your weapons. Along the wall you’ll find posts embedded in the floor.” He pointed to where he had set the posts himself earlier that day, where they would be easily concealable among the old tree tubs and stacks of clay pots. “I want to see your exercise—backhand, forehand, and down, just those three strokes. First just to get the hang of your sword, then as hard as you can, as if you had a man in front of you, out to slice off your heads.”

  A few of them looked squeamish at the idea; others started eagerly for the weapons. Sun Wolf roared, “Get back into ranks!”

  They did—quickly. The tall woman looked as if she might speak, but thought better of it.

  “Nobody breaks ranks until I give the order,” he barked at them. “If you were my men, I’d smarten you up with a switch. As it is, all I can do is throw you out on your pretty little arses before you endanger the rest of the troop by failure to obey orders. If I tell you to stand in ranks and then I walk out of the room and take a nap, I’d better find you still in ranks and on your feet when I get back, even if it’s the next morning. You understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” they sang out.

  “Now go!” He clapped his hands, and the echoes of it were still ringing in the high rafters as the women scattered to obey.

  Behind him, a woman’s voice remarked, “You’re being nice to them.”

  He glanced back and met Denga Rey’s dark, sardonic eyes. Like him, and like most of the women, the gladiator was stripped for exercise, and her brown body was marked with scars of varying age. The feeble lamplight flashed on the bald arch of her skull.

  He grunted. “If you call that ‘nice,’ you have a different standard of it than I do, woman.”

  “After the gladiators’ school,” the warrior returned equably, “you’re a lover’s caress—and I think we’ve got the same standard, soldier.”

  He studied her in silence for a moment. She was younger than he’d first thought, probably not more than twenty-one or twenty-two, a big, dark mare of a girl with belly muscles as ridged and ripply as a crocodile’s back. In her alternation of silence and mockery on the voyage, he had sensed her animosity toward him and h
ad wondered what he would do if his only possible second-in-command hated him because she was not first. He knew himself to be an intruder to the organization, whether against his will or not. Sheera was still clearly in command, but he had usurped a spot only slightly below hers; no matter how much they needed him, there was bound to be ill will. He had just been wondering whether it would come down to a physical confrontation between himself and the gladiator when, for reasons of her own, she had apparently decided to accept him; but occasionally he still caught her watching him with a strange gleam in her dark eyes.

  “There’s no point in taking it out on them because I was dragooned into this lunacy,” he said at last. Then, nodding toward them, he asked, “What do you think of them?”

  She grinned. “They’re rather sweet,” she said. “Six months ago, you’d never have got a sword into their dainty little mitts. But since the men have been gone, they’ve been learning that they can work—not just these women, or the women in the conspiracy, but all of them. They’re running the shops, the farms, and the banking and merchant concerns as well. I think some of them, like our Gilden, even enjoy having a blade in their hands.”

  He admitted grudgingly, “I will say this for them—they did turn out. That surprised me. Most people will put up all the money you want, from a safe distance.”

  She shrugged her shoulders, the muscles of them shining like brown hardwood. “They did put up a phenomenal amount of money, you know,” she remarked. “For all that little Drypettis gets under my skin, she’s a damned good organizer when it comes to the tin side of an operation. She was responsible for that end of it.”

  “Was she?” His eyes traveled down the line of sweating women, hacking doggedly at their posts, as he searched out Sheera’s pint-size disciple.

  “Of course. She’s still the one who holds the purse strings of the operation. When it was just a question of hiring you and your men, she was Sheera’s number two person. It’s Dru who’s kept that damned brother of hers off our backs, too,” she added, flicking a speck of dust from the worn black leather of her breast guard. “She’s done one hell of a lot for the organization—but damn, that pinch face of hers sticks in my craw. If Sheera hadn’t pointed out to her that what we were doing was a military operation, I don’t think she’d ever have spoken to me.”

  His eyes narrowed as they returned to that straight, rigid back and the long tail of thick brown hair that dangled between those slender shoulders.

  Not Denga Rey. It was Drypettis whom he had supplanted.

  From what he’d seen of her, she wasn’t likely to take kindly to being ousted from her place as Sheera’s advisor and relegated to mere trooper—the more so because she was not that good a trooper. He remembered her expression on the wharf when Denga Rey, Amber Eyes, and their rowdy friends had rioted past, whistling at him like a crowd of sailors ogling a girl—an expression not only of embarrassed rage but also almost of pain at having to associate with such people at all.

  Politics makes strange bedfellows and no error, he thought and wondered again how these disparate women had ever come together in the first place.

  “And what about you?” he asked Denga Rey as the gladiator stood, scarred arms folded, surveying their joint charges. “How’d a nice girl like you end up in a place like this?”

  Her eyes mocked him. “Me? Oh, I’m in this only for the sake of the one I love.”

  He stared at her in surprise. “You have a man up in the mines?” It was the last thing he would have expected of her.

  The curved, black eyebrows shot up; then she burst into a whoop of delighted laughter. “A man?” she choked, her eyes dancing. “You think I’d do this for a man? Oh, soldier, you kill me.” And she swaggered off, chuckling richly to herself.

  Sun Wolf shook his head and turned his attention back to the laboring women. The hard maple of the practice posts was barely chipped—none of them seemed to have any idea how to hold or use a sword. He rolled his eyes briefly heavenward, as if seeking advice from his ancestors—not, he reflected, that any of the lunatic berserkers whose seed had spawned him had ever found themselves in the position of teaching a bunch of soft-bred and lily-handed ladies the grim arts of war. Then he went patiently down the line, correcting grips that would surely have cost the wielders their weapons at the first blow, if they didn’t break their wrists in the bargain.

  Most of the young men who had come to him in Wrynde, singly or in small troops, were not novices. They had handled swords, if only in the more gentlemanly arts of dueling or militia training. Their muscles were hardened from the sports of boys or from work. A fair number of these women—the wealthier ones especially—had very clearly done neither sports nor work since childhood. Their bodies, as he viewed them with a critical eye that brought blushes to the cheeks of those who noticed the direction of his gaze, might be trim enough, but their flesh was slack.

  He shook his head again. And they expected to be able to storm the mines! He only hoped to be far along the road to Wrynde when they tried it.

  He went back along the line, patiently correcting strokes.

  Many of them shied from his touch, having been trained to walk veiled and downcast in the presence of men. The tall woman who had challenged him was red-faced and missish; Gilden Shorad, coldly businesslike; Wilarne M’Tree, grave and trusting. Drypettis jerked violently from his correcting hand, and for a moment he saw in her eyes not only a jealous hatred but terror as well. A virgin, he thought. It figures. And likely to remain that way, for all her prettiness.

  Gently, he held out his hand for the sword and demonstrated the proper way to use it. Those huge, pansy-brown eyes followed the movements of his hand devouringly, without once straying to either his body or his face. Her cheeks were scarlet, as if scalded.

  For all that she was a tough little piece, and grittily determined to do well, she was another one, Sun Wolf thought, whom he’d have to watch.

  It was only at Sheera’s insistence that she had been included in the troop at all.

  The first muster of women had yielded over a hundred, of whom he had cut almost half on the spot. Some of them had been dismissed purely for physical reasons—fatness, or that telltale pallor of internal pain that marked old childbirth injuries. Many of them he’d cut because of the obvious signs of drunkenness or drug addiction. Four girls he had rejected simply because they were thirteen years old, though they had sworn, with tears, that they were fifteen and their mothers knew where they were. Three women he had dismissed, as tactfully as he could, because his instincts and a very short observation told him that they were quarrelsome, people who fomented discord either for their own amusement or simply unconsciously, as if they could not help it. The female version of this was less physical than that of the male, but the result was the same. In a secret command, troublemakers were not to be tolerated.

  The women who were left were mostly young, the wives of craftsmen and laborers, though there was a fair sprinkling of merchants’ wives of varying degrees of wealth. About a dozen were whores, though privately, Sun Wolf did not expect most of them to stay the course. Enormous experience in the field had taught him that most women who sold themselves for a living lacked either discipline or the strength to control their lives—and he suspected this to be true even of those whom he had not rejected out of hand for drinking or drugs. One of the women in the final group that remained was a nun, an elderly woman who’d been the Convent baker for twenty years and had a grip like a blacksmith’s. He thought of Starhawk and smiled.

  Those who were left he had divided into four groups, with instructions to report on alternate nights, either a few hours after sunset or at midnight. With luck, this arrangement would keep Sheera’s townhouse and grounds from being obviously the center of activity, for there were three or four ways into the compound, and others were being devised. Yirth had sworn a death curse upon betrayal from within, and the women had sworn fellowship with one another and loyalty to Sheera.

  They wer
e as safe as they could be, given the appalling circumstances, but Sun Wolf looked down the line of those white, sweating, sluglike bodies with no particularly sanguine hopes of success.

  The women slipped quietly away from the bathhouse at the bottom of the grounds nearly two hours later, gowned once more as the respectable matrons or maidens they had been before they took up the study of arms. From the dark door of the orangery, Sun Wolf watched them, brief shadows against the dull, reddish glow from the pavilion’s windows, seeking passages, posterns, plank bridges over the canals, and the narrow back streets that would lead them to gondolas tied up in secluded courtyard lagoons. Light rainfall pattered on the bare, gray stems of the deserted garden. Beyond the walls, the lapping of the canals formed the murmurous background music to all life in that watery city.

  The water clock in the dim room behind him told him that it would shortly be midnight. The women of the next group would appear soon.

  The cold dampness bit into the bare flesh of his shoulders and legs, and he turned back into the silent wooden vaults of the orangery itself.

  Sheera was there, wrapped in a shawl of flame-colored wool whose fringes brushed her bare feet. She was dressed for training in short drawers and leather guards, and her dark eyes were angry.

  “Do you have to run them so hard?” she demanded shortly. “Some of them are so exhausted they can hardly stagger.”

  “You want to ask ’em whether they’d rather be exhausted now or slaughtered to the last woman later on?”

  Her face reddened. “Or are you trying to run them all out, in the hopes that I’ll give up my plans to free the men from the mines?”

  “Women, I’ve learned by this time it’s no use hoping you’ll give up any plan that you’ve come up with, no matter how witless it is,” he snapped at her, walking over to the room’s single brazier of charcoal to rub his hands over the molten glow of the blaze. “If those women can’t take it, they’d better get out of the army. We don’t know what kind of resistance you’ll meet with up in the mines. Since you’ve made me the instructor, I’m damned well going to prepare those women for anything.”