She settled herself in the saddle and collected the reins with a spare economy of movement that spoke of a life lived in the saddle. “Come out of that web-footed marsh to visit me, if you will,” she added. “We need to further our acquaintance.”
So saying, she wheeled her horse and, ignoring the other women as if they had not existed, rode through them and away over the moors.
After that they met mornings and evenings, rotating the groups—by daylight in the ruins of the old Cairn Tower, by lamplight in the boarded-up orangery. Sun Wolf announced that running to and from the peasant hut where they frequently hid their cloaks would provide the conditioning necessary for wind and muscles, and thereafter seldom took the women on a general run. Within a week he could tell which ones ran to and from the tower and which walked.
The ones who walked—there were not many—were cut.
And all the while, he could feel them coming together as a force under his hand. He was beginning to know them and to understand the changes he saw in them, not only in their bodies but in their minds as well. With their veils and chaperons, they had—timidly at first, then more boldly—discarded the instinctive notion that they were incapable of wielding weapons, even in their own defense. Since his conversation with Amber Eyes, Sun Wolf had often wondered what went on in the minds of those pliant, quiet ones, the ones who had been raised to tell men only what they wanted to hear. These women looked him in the face when they spoke to him now, even the shyest. He wondered whether that was the effect of weapons training or whether it was because, when they weren’t learning how to fight, they were running the financial life of the city.
He had to admit to himself that, after a discouraging start, they were turning out to be a fairly good batch of warriors.
The weapons they found cached in the Cairn Tower were old, and their make cruder and heavier than was general among the expert metalworkers of Mandrigyn. Gilden’s sister Eo and young Tisa set up a forge at the tower to lighten them as much as they could without losing the weight necessary to parry and deliver killing strokes. Denga Rey, watching the practice at the tower one day, suggested that the half-pints of the troop use halberds instead.
“A five-foot halberd can be used in battle like a sword,” she said, watching Wilarne laboring to wield her weapon against a leggy black courtesan named Cobra. The roofless hall of the old fortress made a smooth-floored, oval arena some forty feet in length, and the women were scattered across it, wrestling, fighting with weapons, practicing the deadlier throws and breaks of sneak attacks. For once it was not raining, and, except in the low places, the floor was dry. The Wolf had worked them here on days when mud coated them so thickly that it was only by size and the way they moved that they could be distinguished.
From where he and the gladiator stood on what must have been the old feasting dais, they could look out across the sunken floor of the room to the steps and the empty triple arch of the doorway and to the moors beyond. There must have been a courtyard of some kind there once—now there was only a flattened depression in the ground and little heaps of stones covered with lichens and weeds. And below him, between him and the door, the women were busy.
He wondered what the Hawk would make of them.
Denga Rey continued. “Most of the little ones are using swords that are as light as possible for effective weapons—and they are still having troubles. In a pitched fight, a man could outreach them.”
Sun Wolf nodded. With luck, they would surprise the guards at the mines and free and arm the men from the guards’ armories without the need for a pitched battle. But long experience had taught him never to rely on luck.
The only problem with having the smaller women use halberds in battle came from Drypettis, who took it as a personal affront that the Wolf would make allowance for her size. In a tight voice, she told him, “We can succeed on your own terms, Captain. There is no need to condescend.”
He glanced down at her, startled. At times she sounded like an absurd echo of Sheera, without Sheera’s shrewdness or her sense of purpose. Patiently, he said, “There’s only one set of terms to measure success in war, Drypettis.”
That tight little fold at the corners of her mouth deepened. “So you have told us—repeatedly,” she retorted with distaste. “And in the crudest possible fashion.”
Behind her, Gilden and Wilarne exchanged a glance; the other small women—Sister Quincis and red-haired Tamis Weaver—looked uneasy.
“Have I?” the Wolf rumbled quietly. “I don’t think so.
“Success in war,” he went on, “is measured by whether or not you do what you aim to—not by whether you yourself live or die. The success of a war is not measured in the same terms as the success of a fight. Succeeding in a war is getting what you want, whether you yourself live or die. Now, it’s sometimes nicer to be alive afterward and enjoy what you’ve fought for—provided what you’ve fought for is enjoyable. But if you want it badly enough—want others to have it—even that isn’t necessary. And it sure as hell doesn’t matter how nobly or how crudely you pursue your goal, or who makes allowances or who condescends to you in the process. If you know what you want, and you want it badly enough to do whatever you have to, then do it. If you don’t—forget it.”
The silence in that single corner of the half-ruined tower was palpable, the shrill grunts and barked commands in the hall beyond them seeming to grow as faint and distant as the keening of the wind across the moors beyond the walls. It was the first time that he had spoken of war to them, and he felt all the eyes of this small group of tiny women on him.
“It’s the halfway that eats you,” he said softly. “The trying to do what you’re not certain that you want to do; the wanting to do what you haven’t the go-to-hell courage—or selfishness—to carry through. If what you think you want can only be got with injustice and getting your hands dirty and trampling over friends and strangers—then understand what it will do to others, what it will do to you, and either fish or cut bait. If what you think you want can only be got with your own death or your own lifelong utter misery—understand that, too.
“I fight for money. If I don’t win, I don’t get paid. That makes everything real clear for me. You—you’re fighting for other things. Maybe for an idea. Maybe for what you think you ought to believe in, because people you consider better than you believe in it, or say they do. Maybe to save someone who fed and clothed and loved you, the father of your children—maybe out of love and maybe out of gratitude. Maybe you’re fighting because somebody else’s will had drawn you into this, and you’d rather die yourself than tell her you have other goals than hers. I don’t know that. But I think you’d better know it—and know it real clearly, before any of you faces an armed enemy.”
They were silent around him, these half-pints, these small and delicate women. Wilarne’s eyes fell in confusion, and he saw rose flush up under her wind-bitten cheeks.
But it was Drypettis who spoke. “Honor demands—”
“To hell with honor,” the Wolf said shortly, understanding that she had not heard one word he had said. “Women don’t have honor.”
She went white with anger. “Maybe the women you habitually consort with do not—”
“Captain!” Denga Rey’s voice cut across the scuffling, sharp and uneasy. “Someone coming!”
Every sense suddenly snapped alert. He said briefly, “Hide.” All around them, at the sound of the gladiator’s words, the women had been fading from sight, seeking the darkness of the arches that had once supported a gallery around the hall, now a ruin of scrub and shadow; they were concealing themselves in the hundred bolt holes afforded by ruined passages and half-collapsed turrets whose stones were feathered with dry moss and fern. Gilden and Wilarne clambered up inside the monstrous flue of the hall’s old chimney as if trained from childhood as climbing boys.
Only Drypettis stood where she was, rigid with anger. “You can’t...” she began, almost stifling with rage.
Sun Wolf sei
zed her arm impatiently and half threw her toward a droop-eyed hollow of a broken doorway. “Hide, rot your eyes!” he roared at her and ran to where only Sheera and Denga Rey stood, visible on either side of the triple arch of the raised door.
From here, the valley in which the Cairn Tower was situated could be seen in one sweep of trampled brown grass and standing water. Desolately empty, it lay hemmed in by the stone-crested hills and the gray weight of cloud cover, a solitude unbroken save by a few barren and wind-crippled trees. Then, in that solitude, something moved, a figure running toward the tower.
“It’s Tisa,” Sheera said, surprise and fear in her voice. “She was on watch at Ghnir Crag, keeping an eye on the direction of town.”
Denga Rey said, “There’s something else moving down there, too. Look, in the brush along the side of the crag.”
The girl plunged, stumbling, up the ruined steps and into Sun Wolf’s arms. She was panting, unable to catch her breath—not the measured wind of a racer, but the panic gasps of one who had fled for her life.
“What is it?” Sun Wolf asked, and she raised her face to stare into his with widened ayes.
“Nuuwa,” she choked. “Coming here—lots of them, Captain.”
“More than twenty?”
She nodded; her flesh was trembling under his hands at what she had so narrowly escaped. “I couldn’t count, but I think there were more than twenty. Coming from all sides...”
“Pox rot the filthy things. Turn out!” he bellowed, his voice like thunder in the weed-grown walls. “We’re under attack! Nuuwa—lots of ’em!”
The shadows blossomed women. Just under half the strength of the troop was there that day, eighteen women counting Sheera.
“Twenty nuuwa!” Denga Rey was saying. “What the hell are that many nuuwa doing in the Thaneland? That’s ridiculous! You never see more than a few at a time, and never...”
But as she was cursing she was gathering up her weapons. Women were running all around, leaping up the crazy walls under Sheera’s shouted commands. Some of them had bows and arrows; others had the heavy, old-fashioned swords. All of them had daggers.
But if you are close enough to use a dagger on a nuuwa, Sun Wolf thought, it is far too late.
He could see them now, moving out in the hills. Slumped bodies were creeping along the road, or emerging from the brushy slopes between the hills with a deceptively quick, shambling lope. He felt his hair prickle at the numbers of them. By the First Ancestor of the World, how many were there?
“Somebody make a fire,” he ordered, and went scrambling up the slumped remains of a gallery stair to the broken platform above the door. The view from the top turned him sick with dread.
The nuuwa had broken cover from the hills all around and were converging on the tower. Eyeless heads wagged loosely on lolling necks; shoulders were bent so that the creatures’ big, claw-nailed hands flopped, twitching, around their knees. The hollows of those eaten-out eye sockets swayed back and forth, as if they still sighted through the scarred-over, fallen flesh. If it were not for the way the nuuwa moved—dead straight, with no consideration for the rise and fall of the ground—they might almost have been mistaken for true men.
Sun Wolf counted almost forty.
From here, he could look down upon all of the Cairn Tower. What remained of the curtain wall that had once surrounded the place lay in a sloppy ring around the oval tower itself. Wall and tower were not concentric—the tower stood at one end, so that its triple-arched doorway, empty of any defensive barrier, looked straight out into the valley. Below him, he could see the women fanning out along the broken top of the curtain wall, the bare flesh of their shoulders and the colors of their hair very bright against the winter drabness of lichenous stone and yellowed weeds and heather. No need to conceal themselves, for nuuwa did not track their prey by sight. No need for strategy, for the nuuwa understood none.
All they understood—all they sought—was flesh.
From the wall, he heard the whining thwunk of bowstrings and saw two of the advancing creatures stumble. One of them lumbered to its feet again and came on, the arrow sticking through its neck like a hatpin through a doll; the other staggered a few steps, spouting blood from a punctured jugular, then fell, its grotesquely grown teeth snapping in horrible chewing motions as it tried to wallow its way along. Another of the creatures tripped over it in its advance, then got up and shambled on. Nuuwa—in common with all other predators—would not touch the flesh of nuuwa. The ground was prickled with arrows. Most of the women had terrible aim.
Smoke stung his eyes. Below him in the court, he could see that Gilden had got a fire going—Tisa was gathering up branches, sticks, anything that could be used as torches. Sheera and Denga Rey both had fire in their hands as they stood in the open arches of the door. Nuuwa had just enough instinct to fear the heat of fire. From his vantage point, the Wolf could see that in some fashion they knew that there was no wall at the doorway. Half a dozen were shambling toward the two women who stood in that gap.
He came down from the platform at a run.
Wet mud and pits of last week’s thin snowfall scummed the crazy steps. The entire curtain wall must have the same vile footing, he thought. Then he heard it, beyond the higher ruins of the tower. From along the wall, now out of his sight, came the slithering crash of dislodged stone and falling bodies, the hooting grunts of the nuuwa, and the soft, smacking thunk of steel biting naked flesh.
He had a torch in one hand and a sword in the other as he sprang up the steps to the empty gateway instants before the nuuwa came lolloping, gape-mouthed, to meet the women. Sheera made the mistake of slashing at the widest target—the breast—and the creature she cut fell on her with a vast, streaming wound yawning in its chest, eyeless face contorted, mouth reaching to bite. The Wolf had decapitated the first creature within range; he spun in the next split second and hacked off both huge hands that gripped Sheera’s arm, allowing her to spring back out of range and slash downward on the thing’s neck. It was all he had time for—nuuwa were pressing up toward them, heedless of the cut of the steel; spouting blood drenched them, hot on the flesh and running down slippery underfoot. Beside him, he was vaguely aware of Denga Rey, fighting with the businesslike brutality of a professional with sword and torch.
He felt something gash and tear at his ankle, then saw that a fallen nuuwa had sunk its teeth into his calf. He slashed downward, severing the head as it tore at his flesh. Clawed hands seized his sword arm, and he cut at the eyeless face with his torch, setting the matted hair and filthy, falling beard aflame. The creature released him and began shrieking in a rattling, hoarse gasp, blundering against its fellows and pawing at the blaze. Denga Rey, freed for an instant, kicked it viciously back, and it went rolling down the steps, face flaming, howling in death agonies as others stumbled over it to close in on the defenders.
Through the confusion of that hideous fight and the searing agony of the head still clinging doggedly to his calf, Sun Wolf could hear the distant chaos of cries, hoarse grunts, and shrill shouts. He heard a scream, keening and horrible, rising to a fever pitch of rending pain and terror, and knew that one of the women had been overcome and was being killed. But like so many things in the heat of battle, he noted it without much interest, detached, grimly fighting to avoid a like fate himself. Another scream sounded closer, together with a slithering crash of bodies falling from the wall. From the corner of his eye, he saw locked forms writhing on the icy clay of the hall floor, a tangle of threshing limbs and fountaining blood. Eo the blacksmith sprang forward with one of those huge two-handed broadswords upraised as if it were as light as a willow switch. He saw no more; filthy hands and snapping, slobbering mouths pressed close around him. For a moment, he felt as if he were being engulfed in that horrible mob, driven back into the shadow of the empty gateway and wondering where the drop of the steps was.
Then steel zinged near him; as he decapitated one of the things grabbing and biting at him, Denga Rey’s
sword sliced the spine of another, and it fell, rolling and spasming, at his feet. Those were the last of the immediate attackers. He swung around and saw that the steps were piled knee-deep in twitching bodies, from which a thick current of brilliant red ran down to pool among the rocks. Behind him, the tower was silent, save for a single voice raised in a despairing wail of grief.
The nuuwa were all dead.
He looked down to where the severed head still locked on his calf with a death grip. Fighting a surge of nausea, he bent down and beat at the joint of the jawbone with the weighted pommel of his sword until the jaw broke and he was able to pull the thing off by its verminous hair. Hands shaking, he knelt on the slimy steps and held out his hand for Denga Rey’s torch, since his own had been lost in the fight. Reversing it, he drove the flaming end into the wound. Smoke and the stink of burning meat assailed his nostrils; the pain went through his body like a stroke of lightning. Distantly, he was aware of the sound of Sheera’s being sick in a corner of the hall.
He flung the torch away and collapsed on his hands and knees, fighting nausea and darkness. It wasn’t the first time he had had to do this, from nuuwa or from other wounds, but it never got any easier.
Footsteps pattered on the clay floor. He heard the murmur of voices and opened his eyes to see Amber Eyes binding up Denga Rey’s bloody arm with someone’s torn, gold-embroidered scarf.
Both women hastened to his side, and Amber Eyes knelt to bandage his wounds. Her hands were sticky with gore. When he had breath to speak, Sun Wolf asked them, “You bitten anywhere?”
“Few slashes,” the gladiator said shortly.
“Burn ’em.”
“They’re not deep.”
“I said burn ’em. We aren’t talking about sword cuts in the arena; nuuwa are filthier than mad dogs. I’ll do it for you if you’re afraid.”
The Ladies of Mandrigyn Page 12