The Ladies of Mandrigyn

10

“Mother’s crying.”

Sun Wolf glanced up at this new, soft voice intruding into the solitude of the rain-wet garden. Sheera’s daughter, Trella, who was sitting beside him with the trowel and handrake in her small grip, said automatically, “She isn’t either.”

The tiny boy who had brought this news picked his way through the damp, turned ground to where the Wolf and the little girl sat on a huge rock; he seemed infinitely careful about not getting mud on his black slippers and hose. Trella, who was six and had been assisting Sun Wolf in his duties as gardener since he had come to Sheera’s townhouse, had no such considerations. Her black wool skirts were kilted up almost to her thighs, and two little legs in wrinkled black stockings stuck out over the edge of the rock like sticks.

The boy said nothing, only stared at them both with Sheera’s beautiful, pansy-brown eyes.

“Mother never cries nowadays. And Nurse says you’re not supposed to suck your thumb like a baby,” Trella added, as a clinching argument.

He removed thumb from mouth, but held onto it with his other hand, as if he were afraid it would fall off or dry out if not protected. “She cried when Father died,” he said defensively. “And Nurse says you’re not supposed to sit on rocks and plays with the slaves.”

“I’m not playing with him, I’m helping him work,” Trella said with dignity. “Aren’t I?”

“Indeed you are,” Sun Wolf replied gravely, but there was a glitter of amusement in his beer-colored eyes as he regarded Sheera’s children.

He seldom saw Graal Galernas, age four; though the boy was physically a miniature Sheera, he was soft, rather timid, and stood very much upon his dignity as the head of the House of Galernas. Trella presumably favored their deceased father; she was a sandy-haired, hazel-eyed, snub-nosed child who stood in awe of no one but her beautiful mother. Sun Wolf had met the two when they’d sneaked away from their nurse to play in the orangery, as was evidently their wont. It was a custom Sheera had never mentioned, and he wondered if she knew. Graal had bored quickly of gardening, but Trella had helped him build the succession houses along the south orangery wall, in the course of which project she had provided him with a surprising and varied assortment of information about Sheera herself.

Now Graal said, “She did too cry when Father died.”

Trella shrugged. “She was crying before that. She cried when the messengers came to the house about the battle and she was crying when she got back from Lady Tilth’s later that day. And I heard her crying down in the kitchen when she was mulling some wine for Father.”

“She never did that,” her brother contradicted, still hanging onto his thumb. “We’ve got servants to mull wine.” He was shivering, despite the silver-laced velvet of his tiny doublet; though it had stopped raining some hours ago, the day was cold and the air damp. In the barren drabness of the empty garden, he looked like a dropped jewel against the dirt.

“Well, she did too,” Trella retorted. “I was playing in the pantry and I heard her. And then she went up to her room and cried and cried and she was still up there when Father got stomach cramps and died, so there.”

Tears flooded the boy’s soft eyes, and his thumb returned to his mouth. Around it he mumbled wretchedly, “Nurse says you’re not supposed to play in the pantry.”

“That was months and months and months ago, and if you tattle, I’ll put a snail in your bed.” Just to be prepared, she hopped down from the rock and began to hunt for the promised snail. Graal backed hastily away and fled crying toward the house.

Sun Wolf sat, his knees drawn up, on the river-smoothed stone and watched the child go. Then he glanced back at the little girl, still grubbing purposefully about in the loose, turned earth of the rock garden bed he’d been preparing. “He loved your father, didn’t he?”

She straightened up, flushed and sullen. “He’s just a baby.” That, evidently, settled father and brother both.

If they knew so much, the Wolf wondered whether they knew about their mother and Tarrin as well.

He himself would no more have told a child that her father was a collaborator or her mother a slut than he would have whipped a puppy for something it did not do, and for pretty much the same reasons. He looked upon children as young animals, and neither Graal nor Trella seemed to mind this offhand treatment. But his own childhood had taught him that there was very little that men and women would not do to their children.

He wondered what it was that Sheera had gotten from Yirth to put in her husband’s mulled wine.

Wind stirred the bare branches of the hedges above the hollow where they worked; silver droplets of rain shook loose over them. Sun Wolf paid the drops no heed—he’d been wet and cold a good portion of his life and thought nothing of it—and Trella, who had been consciously imitating him for some weeks, ignored them as well. The smell of the earth mingled with the damp, musty silence as he arranged and rearranged the smooth, bare bones of the rocks, seeking the indefinable harmony of shape, and it wasn’t until much later that Trella broke the silence.

“She isn’t crying,” she declared. After a moment she added, “And anyway, it’s just because that man’s here to see her.”

“That man,” Sun Wolf knew, was Derroug Dru, Altiokis’ governor of Mandrigyn.

Sure enough, a short while later he saw the dapper little figure of the governor emerge from the orangery and stroll along the path with a servant to hold a gilt-tasseled umbrella over his head. The family resemblance to Drypettis was marked; both were tiny, but where Drypettis was slender, Governor Derroug Dru was a skinny, crooked little runt, the haughty set of whose head and shoulders dwindled rapidly to weak and spindly legs. One leg was nothing more than a twisted bone cased in silken hose whose discreet padding accentuated, rather than hid, its deformity; he walked with a cane, and Sun Wolf had seen how all of his entourage slowed their steps to match his, not out of courtesy, but out of fear. His thinning brown hair was suspiciously bright around the temples, and his eyes, brown and dissipated, were carefully painted to hide the worst marks of excess. Right now, he had only the one servant with him, but the Wolf knew he usually traveled with a whole shoal of hangers-on and several bodyguards. He was not a man popular in Mandrigyn.

Amber Eyes had told the Wolf that before Altiokis had taken the town, she and her friends used to draw straws, the short straw having to take Derroug. Since he had become governor, his vices had become more open.

Sun Wolf bent his head, smoothing the damp earth around the stones. He heard the tap of the cane and the slightly dragging stride pause on the flagstoned path; he felt the man’s eyes on him, hating him for his height. Then Derroug passed on. It was beneath the dignity of the governor of Mandrigyn to notice a slave seriously.

At his elbow, Trella’s voice whispered, “I hate him!”

He glanced from the little girl to the elegant figure ascending the terrace steps, a splash of white fur and lilac silks against the mottled grays and moss-stained reds of the back of the house and the startling white of the marble of pavement and pilaster. Sheera never spoke of the governor, but he had come to see her several times since the Wolf had been there, and never when Drypettis was present. Sun Wolf guessed that the little woman ran interference between her brother and her friend—which, totally aside from her former position in the conspiracy, might explain Sheera’s attachment to her.

It had begun to rain again. The children’s nurse came bustling along the path to scold Trella for being out without a maidservant, for not wearing her veils, for getting her hands dirty, and for consorting with a rough and dirty man. “Speaking to a man alone... a fine little trull people will take you for!” she clucked, and Trella hung her head.

Sun Wolf wiped his hands on his patched breeches and said dryly, “I’ve been accused of a lot of things in my time, woman, but this is the first anyone’s ever thought I’d try to corrupt a six-year-old.” He did not like the nurse.

She elevated her well-shaped little nose to a slightly more lofty angle than usual and retorted, “It is the principle. A girl cannot learn too young what is beyond the lines of propriety. It appalls me to see what is happening in the town these days—women going barefaced and sitting right out at the counters of public shops like prostitutes in their windows... and consorting with prostitutes, too, I shouldn’t wonder! That hussy who was here earlier actually had paint on her face! What my old lord would have said...”

She retreated down the path, holding the unwilling child close to her skirts, clucking and fluttering to herself about the city’s fall from virtue.

Sun Wolf shook his head and gathered up his tools. The rain was the fine, blowing, fitful sort that heralded a heavier storm come nightfall; it plastered his long hair down over his shoulders and soaked quickly through the coarse canvas of his shirt. Still, he stood for a time, studying the rocks where he’d settled them—the smooth granite boulder buried half heeled over, so that the long fissure in its side was visible and it formed a sort of cave underneath, protected by the four smaller stones. The lines of it were right, making a sort of music against the starkness of the liver-colored earth, but he thought that he would have liked to have Starhawk’s opinion.

In a way it troubled him, how often that thought had crossed his mind.

He had always known she was a good lieutenant. Not only her skill in taking on and defeating much larger men but also the inhuman cold-bloodedness that she habitually showed the troops put them in awe of her, and that was as it should be. As a leader, he had valued her wary painstakingness and her lucidness in defining problems and solutions. As a man set apart by his position as chief, he had valued her company.

It wasn’t until now that he realized how much he simply valued her. On campaign, days or weeks might go by without his seeing her, but he had known she was always there. Now s sometimes he would waken in the night and realize that if something went wrong—which he had no doubt that it would—he would never see her again. He had half expected to die in Mandrigyn, but he had never before thought of death in those terms.

It was a dangerous thought, and he pushed it from his mind as he entered the vast brown shadows of the orangery. It was, he thought, what his father had meant when he spoke of going soft—a blurring on the hard edge of a warrior’s heart. And why, damn it all? Starhawk wasn’t even pretty.

Not what most fools would call pretty, anyway.

Rain beat on the portion of the orangery roof that was not covered by the loft. The great room echoed softly with its dull roaring. In the now-familiar darkness, the few trees that had not been moved out into the succession houses were grouped like sleeping trolls in a corner, concealing the practice hacking-posts. The table still stood at the end of the room near the door that led to his narrow stairs. On an overturned tub, her head in her hands, staring blindly at the gray boards of the wall, sat Sheera, the heavy wool of her crimson gown falling like a river of blood about her feet.

Her son had been right. She had clearly been crying.

Her eyes, when she raised them as he passed, were red-rimmed and swollen, but he saw her force hardness into them and calm into her face. She said, “How soon can the women be ready to attack the mines?”

“With or without a wizard to help?” he countered.

The tiredness in her face turned to anger, like a flash of lighted Wasting powder, and she opened her mouth to snap something at him.

“A real wizard, not the local poison monger.”

The red lips closed, and the hard lines that he had lately seen so often carved themselves from the flared nostrils to the taut corners of her mouth. “How long?”

“A month—six weeks.”

“That’s too long.”

He shrugged. “You’re the commander—Commander.”

He turned to go, and she surged to her feet and seized his arm, thrusting him around to face her again. “What’s wrong with going in now?”

“Nothing,” he said. “As long as you don’t care that all of your friends who’ve been loyal enough to you—and to their patriotic and pox-rotted cause—to half kill themselves and put their families in danger by learning how to soldier are going to die because you lead them into battle half prepared.”

Her hand dropped from his arm as if his flesh had turned to a serpent’s scales. But he saw in her anger a lurking fear as well, the desperation of a woman fighting fate and circumstance with dwindling reserves of strength.

“Don’t you understand?” she asked, her voice trembling with weariness and rage, “Every day we wait, he gets stronger; and every day we wait, the chances double that Tarrin will be hurt or put to death in the mines. They already suspect him of organizing trouble there; he has been whipped and racked for it, then thrown back onto the chain to do his full share of the work with his limbs half dislocated. One day word of it will get back to Altiokis. But without him, the men’s resistance would crumble—he is all their hope, and the brightness of his courage all that stands between their minds and the numbing despair of slavery.

“I know,” she whispered. “He is a born leader, a born king; and he has a king’s magic, to draw the hearts of his followers unquestioningly. I loved him from the moment we met; from the instant we laid eyes on each other, we knew we would be lovers.”

“And does that keep you from playing along with the courtship of Derroug Dm?” the Wolf demanded snidely.

“Courtship?” She spat the word at him scornfully. “Pah! Is that what you think he wants? Marriage or even an honorable love? You don’t know the man. Because I was the wife of his chief supporter, the most important and richest man of his faction in the town, he held off. But he would always follow me with his eyes. Now he comes around like a dog when the bitch is in season ...”

Sun Wolf leaned his broad shoulders against one of the rude cedar pillars that held up the roof, “Then I guess poisoning your husband was a little hasty on your part, wasn’t it?”

Her eyes flashed at him like a beast’s in the gloom of the vast hall. “Hasty?” she snarled at him. “Hasty, when that pig had pretended to go over to Tarrin’s faction, during the feuding before Altiokis’ attack; when he encouraged every man loyal to Tarrin, every man loyal to his city, to join Tarrin’s army, already knowing what would happen to them at Iron Pass? There was nothing he did not deserve for what he did that day.”

She was striding back and forth, the faint sheen from the windows rippling like light on an animal’s pelt, her face white against the bloody color of her gown and the blackness of her hair. “What he did that day has cut across my life, cut across the life of every person in this city. It has left us uprooted, robbed us of the ones we love, and put us in continual peril of our lives. What did he deserve, if not that?”

“I don’t know,” Sun Wolf said quietly. “Considering that’s exactly what you did to me, without so much as a second thought, I can’t give a very fair answer to that question.” He left her and mounted the dark, enclosed stairway to his loft, the rain beating like thunder around him and over his head.