Barbara Hambly - The Ladies of Mandrigyn

“Will you take it?”

The Wolf glanced over at her briefly. His eyes, in this light, were pale gold, tike the wines of the Middle Kingdoms, He was close to forty, and his tawny hair was thinning, but there was no gray either in it or in the ragged mustache that drooped like a clump of yellow-brown winter weeds from the underside of a craggy and much-bent nose. The power and thickness of his chest and shoulders made him seem taller than his six feet when he was standing up; seated and at rest, he reminded her of a big, dusty lion. “Would you go against Altiokis?” he asked her.

She hesitated, not speaking her true answer to that. She had heard stories of the Wizard King since she was a tiny girl—bizarre, distorted tales of his conquests, his sins, and his greed. Horrible tales were told of what happened to those who had opposed him, over the timeless years of his uncanny existence.

Her true answer, the one she did not say aloud, was: Yes. if you wanted me to.

What she said was, “Would you?”

He shook his head. “I’m a soldier,” he said briefly. “I’m not wizard. I couldn’t go against a wizard, and I wouldn’t take my people against one. There are two things that my father always told me, if I wanted to live to grow old—don’t fall in love and don’t mess with magic.”

“Three things,” Starhawk corrected, with one of her rare, fleeting grins. “Don’t argue with fanatics.”

“That comes under magic. Or arguing with drunks, I’m not sure which. I don’t understand how there could be one God or three Gods or five or more, but I do know that I had ancestors, drunken, lecherous clowns that they were... Hello, sweetpea.”

The curtain that divided the tent parted, and Fawn came in, brushing the last dampness from the heavy curls of her mink-brown hair. The pale green gauze of her gown made her eyes seem greener, almost emerald. She was Sun Wolf’s latest concubine, eighteen, and heartbreakingly beautiful. “Your bath’s ready,” she said, coming behind the camp chair where he sat to kiss the thin spot in his hair at the top of his head.

He took her hand where it lay on his shoulder and, with a curiously tender gesture for so large and rough-looking a man, he pressed his lips to the white skin of her wrist. “Thanks,” he said. “Hawk, will you wait for a few minutes? If this skirt wants to see me alone, would you take Fawn over to your tent for a while?”

Starhawk nodded. She had seen a series of his girls come and go, all of them beautiful, soft-spoken, pliant, and a little helpless. The camp tonight, after the sacking of the town, was no place for a girl not raised to killing, even if she was the mistress of a man like Sun Wolf.

“So you’re receiving ladies alone in your tent now, are you?” Fawn chided teasingly.

With a movement too swift to be either fought or fled, he was out of his chair, catching her up, squeaking, in his arms as he rose. She wailed, “Stop it! No! I’m sorry!” as he bore her off through the curtain into the other room, her squeals scaling up into a desperate crescendo that ended in a monumental and steamy splash.

Without a flicker of an eyelid, Starhawk shouldered her war gear, called out, “I’ll be back for you in an hour, Fawn,” and departed; only when she was outside did she allow herself a small, amused grin.

She returned in company with An, a young man who was Sun Wolf’s other lieutenant and who rather resembled an adolescent black bear. They bade the Wolf a grave good evening, collected the damp, subdued, and rather pink-cheeked Fawn, and made their way across the camp. The wind had risen again, cold off the sea with the promise of the winter’s deadly storms; drifts of wood smoke from the camp’s fires blew into their eyes. Above them, the fires in the city flared, fanned by the renewed breezes, and a sulfurous glow outlined the black crenellations of the walls. The night tasted raw, wild, and strange, still rank with blood and broken by the wailing of women taken in the sacking of the town.

“Things settling down?” the Hawk asked.

Ari shrugged. “Some. The militia units are already drunk. Gradduck—that tin-pot general who commanded the City Troops—is taking all the credit for breaking the siege.”

Starhawk feigned deep thought. “Oh, yes,” she remembered at length. “The one the Chief said couldn’t lay siege to a pothouse.”

“No, no,” Ari protested, “it wasn’t a pothouse—an outhouse ...”

Voices yelled Ari’s name, calling him to judge an athletic competition that was as indecent as it was ridiculous, and he laughed, waved to the women, and vanished into the darkness. Starhawk and Fawn continued to walk, the wind-torn torchlight banding their faces in lurid colors—the Hawk long-legged and panther-graceful in her man’s breeches and doublet, Fawn shy as her namesake amid the brawling noise of the camp, keeping close to Starhawk’s side. As they left the noisier precincts around the wine issue, the girl asked, “Is it true he’s being asked to go against Altiokis?”

“He won’t do it,” Starhawk said. “Any more than he’d work for him. He was approached for that, too, years ago. He won’t meddle with magic one way or the other, and I can’t say that I blame him. Altiokis is news of the worst possible kind.”

Fawn shivered in the smoky wind and drew the spiderweb silk of her shawl tighter about her shoulders. “Were they all like that? Wizards, I mean? Is that why they all died out?”

In the feeble reflection of lamplight from the tents, her green eyes looked huge and transparent. Damp tendrils of hair clung to her cheeks; she brushed them aside, watching Starhawk worriedly. Like most people in the troop, she was a little in awe of that steely and enigmatic woman.

Starhawk ducked under the door flap of her tent, and held it aside for Fawn to pass. “I don’t know if that’s why the wizards finally died out,” she said. “But I do know they weren’t all evil like Altiokis. I knew a wizard once when I was a little girl. She was very good.”

Fawn stared at her in surprise that came partly from astonishment that Starhawk had ever been a little girl. In a way, it seemed inconceivable that she had ever been anything but what she was now: a tail, leggy cheetah of a woman, colorless as fine ivory-pale hair, pewter-gray eyes—save where the sun had darkened the fine-grained, flawless skin of her face and throat to burnt gold. Her light, cool voice was remarkably soft for a warrior’s, though she was said to have a store of invective that could raise blisters on tanned oxhide. It was more believable of her that she had known a wizard than that she had been a little girl.

“I—I thought they were all gone, long before we were born.”

“No,” the Hawk said. The lamplight sparkled off the brass buckles that studded her sheepskin doublet as she fetched a skin of wine and two cups. Her tent was small and, like her, neat and spare. She had packed away her gear earlier. The only things remaining on the polished wood folding table were the gold-and-shell winecups and a pack of greasy cards. Starhawk was generally admitted to be a shark of poker—with her face, Fawn reflected, she could hardly be anything else.

“I thought that, too,” Starhawk continued, coming back as Fawn seated herself on the edge of the narrow bed. “I didn’t know Sister Wellwa was a wizard for—oh, years.”

“She was a nun?” Fawn asked, startled.

Starhawk weighed her answer for a moment, as if picking her words carefully. Then she nodded. “The village where I grew up was built around the Convent of St. Cherybi in the West. Sister Wellwa was the oldest nun there—I used to see her every day, sweeping the paths outside with her broom made of sticks. As I said, I didn’t know then that she was a wizard.”