Hawkmistress! (23 page)

“I would not think so,” Romilly said after a minute, “Not if she is well fed and well cared for; and you might consider wrapping her legs for extra support on these steep paths.”

“A good thought,” Dom Carlo agreed, and beckoned to Orain; they set about bandaging the legs of their lowlands-bred horses. Romilly’s own horse was bred for the Hellers, shaggy-coated and shaggy-legged, with great tufts of coarse hair around the fetlocks, and for the first time since she had fled from Falconsward, she was glad that she had left her own horse. This one, stranger as he was, had at least borne her faithfully.

After a time they set off, winding downward into the valley, which they reached in time for the midday meal, and then along the gradually broadening, well-travelled road which led into Nevarsin, the City of the Snows.

One more night they camped before they came to the city, and this time, noting what Romilly had done the day before, Orain gave orders to the men that they should groom and properly care for their riding-chervines. They obeyed sullenly, but they obeyed; Romilly heard one of them grumble, “While we have that damned hawk-boy with us, why can’t he care for the beasts? Ought to be his work, not ours!”

“Not likely, when Orain’s already made the brat his own pet,” Alaric grumbled. “Birds be damned - the wretch is with us for Orain’s convenience, not the birds! You think the Lord Carlo will deny his paxman and friend anything he wants?”

“Hush your mouth,” said a third, “You’ve no call to go talking like that about your betters. Dom Carlo’s a good lord to us all, and a faithful man to Carolin, and as for Orain, he was the king’s own foster-brother. Haven’t you noticed? He talks all rough and country, but when he wishes, or when he forgets, he can talk as fine and educated as Dom Carlo himself, or any of the great Hastur-lords themselves! As for his private tastes, I care not whether he wants women or boys or rabbithorns, so long as he doesn’t come after my wife.”

Romilly, her face burning, moved away out of earshot. Reared in a cristoforo family, she had never heard such talk, and it confirmed her opinion that she liked the company of men even less than the company of women. She was too shy, after what she had heard, to join Orain and Dom Carlo where they spread their blankets, and spent that night shivering, crouched among the drowsing stag-ponies for their warmth. By morning she was blue with cold, and huddled as long as she dared near the fire kindled for breakfast, surreptitiously trying to warm her hands against the sides of the porridge-pot. The hot food warmed her a little, but she was still shivering as she exercised and fed the birds - Alaric, still grumbling, had snared a couple of rabbithorns, and they were beginning to smell high; she had to overcome surges of nausea as she cut them up, and afterward she found herself sneezing repeatedly. Dom Carlo cast her a concerned glance as they saddled and climbed on their horses for the last stage of the ride.

“I hope you have not taken cold, my boy.”

Romilly muttered, eyes averted, that the vai dom should not concern himself.

“Let us have one thing clearly understood,” Dom Carlo said, frowning, “The welfare of any of my followers is as important to me as that of the birds to you - my men are in my charge as the birds are in yours, and I neglect no man who follows me! Come here,” he said, and laid a concerned hand against her forehead. “You have fever; can you ride? I would not ask it of you, but tonight you shall be warm in the monastery guest-house, and if you are sick, the good brothers there will see to you.”

“I am all right,” Romilly protested, genuinely alarmed now. She dared not be sick! If she was taken to the monks’ infirmary, certainly, in caring for her sickness they would discover that she was a girl!

”Have you warm clothing enough? Orain, you are nearer his size than I - find the lad something warm,” said Dom Carlo, and then, as he stood still touching her forehead, his face changed; he looked down at Romilly sharply, and for a moment she was sure - she did not know how; laran? - that he knew. She froze with dread, shivering; but he moved away and said quietly, “Orain has brought you a warm vest and stockings - I saw your blistered feet in your boots. Put them on at once; if you are too proud to take them, we shall have it from your wages, but I’ll have noone riding with me who is not warm and dry and comfortable. Go round the fire and change into them, this minute.”

Romilly bowed her head in acquiescence, went behind the line of horses and stag-beasts, and pulled on the warm stockings - heavenly relief to her sore feet - and the heavy undervest. They were somewhat too big, but all the warmer for that. She sneezed again, and Orain gestured to the pot still hanging over the fire, not yet emptied. He dipped up a ladleful of the hot brew and took some leaves from his pouch.

“An old wives’ remedy for the cough that’s better than any healer’s brew. Drink it,” he said, and watched while she gulped at the foul-tasting stuff. “Aye, it’s bitter as lost love, but it drives out the fever.”

Romilly grimaced at the acrid, musty-tasting stuff; it made her flush with inner heat, and left her mouth puckered with its intense astringency, but, later that morning, she realized that she had not sneezed again, and that the dripping of her nose had abated. Riding briefly at his side, she said, “That remedy would make you a fortune in the cities, Master Orain.”

He laughed. “My mother was a leronis and studied healing,” he said, “and went among the country-folk to learn their knowledge of herbs. But the healers in the cities laugh at these country remedies.”

And, she thought, he had been the king’s own foster-brother; and now served the king’s man in exile, Carlo of Blue Lake. What the men had said was true, though she had not noticed it before; talking to the men, he spoke the dialect of the countryside, while, speaking to Dom Carlo, and, increasingly, to her, his accents were those of an educated man. Contrasted to the other men, she felt as safe and comfortable near him as if she were in the presence of her own brothers or her father.

After a time she asked him, “The king -Carolin - he awaits us in Nevarsin? I thought the monks were sworn to take no part in the strife of wordly men? How is it that they take King Carolin’s side in this war? I-I know so little about what is going on in the lowlands.” She remembered what Darren and Alderic had said; it only whetted her appetite to know more.

Orain said, “The brothers of Nevarsin care nothing for the throne of the Hasturs; nor should they. They give shelter to Carolin because, as they say, he has harmed none, and his cousin - the great bastard, Rakhal, who sits on the throne - would kill him for his own ambition. They will not join in his cause, but they will not surrender him to his enemies while he shelters there, either.”

“If Carolin’s claim to the throne is so just,” Romilly asked, “Why has Rakhal won so much support?”

Orain shrugged. “Greed, no doubt. My lands are now in the hands of the chief of Rakhal’s councillors. Men support the man who enriches them, and right has little to do with it. All these men-” he gestured behind them at the followers, “are small-holders whose lands should have been inviolate; they had done nothing but hold loyal to their king, and they should not have been involved in the struggles of the highborn and powerful. Alaric is bitter, aye - know you what was his crime? The crime for which he lost his lands, and was flung into Rakhal’s prison under sentence of losing a hand and his tongue?”

Romilly shuddered. “For such a sentence it must have been a great crime indeed!”

“Only before that cagavrezu Rakhal,” said Orain grimly, “His crime? His children shouted ‘Long live King Carolin’ as one of Rakhal’s greatest scoundrels passed by their village. They meant no harm - I do not think the poor brats knew one king from the other! So the great scoundrel, Lyondri Hastur, said that he must have taught his little children treason - he took the children from Alaric’s house, saying they should be reared by a loyal man, and sent them to serve in his Great House, and flung Alaric into prison. One of the children died, and Alaric’s wife was so distraught with what had befallen her man and her babies that she threw herself from a high window and died. Aye, Alaric is bitter, and thinks good of no one, lad; it is not you he hates, but life itself.”

Romilly looked down toward her saddle, with a deep breath. She knew why Orain had told her this, and it raised still further her admiration of the man; he had tolerance and sympathy even for the man who had spoken such ugly things of him. She said quietly, “I will try not to think half so evil of him as he thinks of me, then, Uncle.”

But still she felt confused. Alderic had spoken of the Haste-kin as descended from Gods, great and noble men, and Orain spoke as if the very word “Hastur” were an insult.

“Are all the Hastur-kin evil men, then?”

“By no means,” Orain said vehemently, “A better man than Carolin never trod this earth; his only fault is that he thought no evil toward those of his kin who were scoundrels, and was all too kind and forgiving toward-” his mouth stretched in what should have been a smile, “bastards with ambition.”

And then he fell silent, and Romilly, watching the lines in his face, knew his thoughts were a thousand leagues away from her, or his men, or Dom Carlo. It seemed that she could see in his mind pictures of a beautiful city built between two mountain passes, but lying low, in a green valley, on the shores of a lake whose waves were like mist rolling up from the depths. A white tower rose near the shores, and men and women passed through the gateways, tall and elegant as if wrapped in a silken glamour, too beautiful to be real … and she could sense the great sorrow in him, the sorrow of the exile, the homeless man….

I too am homeless, I have cast away all my kin… but it may be that my brother Ruyven awaits me in Tramontana Tower. And Orain, too, is alone and without kin….

They rode through the great, frowning gates of Nevarsin just as dusk was falling and the swift night of this time of year had begun to blur the sky with rain. Dom Carlo rode at their head, his cowled hood drawn over his head concealing his features; along the old cobbled streets of the city, and upward along steep paths and narrow winding lanes toward the snow-covered paths that led to the monastery. Romilly thought she had never felt such intense chill; the monastery was situated among the glacier ice, carved from the solid rock of the mountain, and when they paused before the inner gates, under the great statue of the Bearer of Burdens bowed beneath the world’s weight, and the smaller, but still larger-than-life image of Saint-Valentine-of-the-Snows, she was shivering again in spite of the extra warm clothing.

A tall dignified man in the bulky brown robe and cowl of a monk gestured them inside. Romilly hesitated; she had been brought up a cristoforo and knew that no woman might enter into the monastery, even in the guest-house. But she had chosen this disguise and now could not repudiate it. She whispered a prayer - “Blessed Bearer of Burdens, Holy Saint Valentine, forgive me, I mean no intrusion into this world of men, and I swear I will do nothing to disgrace you here.”

It would create a greater scandal if she now revealed her real sex. And she wondered why women were so strongly prohibited. Did the monks fear that if women were there they could not keep to their vows of renunciation? What good were their vows, if they could not resist women unless they never saw any? And why did they think women would care to tempt them anyhow? Looking at the lumpy little monk in the cowl, she thought, with something perilously near a giggle, that it would take more charity than even a saint, to overlook his ugliness long enough to try and tempt him!

There were comfortable stables for all their riding-animals, and an enclosed stone room where Romilly found blocks and perches for her birds.

“You can go into the city and buy food for them,” Orain said, and handed her some copper rings, “But be back in good time for supper in the guest-house; and if you will, you may attend the night prayers - you might like to hear the choir singing.”

Romilly nodded obediently, inwardly delighted; Darren had spoken once of the fine singing of the Nevarsin choir, which he had not, in his days as a student, been musical enough to join; but her father, too, had spoken of one of the high points of his life, when he had attended a solemn service in the monastery and heard the singing of the monks. She hurried out into the city, excited and a little scared by the strange place; but she found a bird-seller, and when she made her wants known to him, he knew at once the proper food for the sentry-birds; she had half expected to have to carry a stinking, half-rotted carcass back through the city, but instead the seller said that he would be pleased to deliver the food to the guest-house stables. “You’ll be lodged in the monastery, young man? If it is your will, I can have proper food delivered every day for your birds.”

“I shall ask my master,” she said, “I do not know how long they propose to stay.” And she thought this was a fine thing, that such services should be provided; but when he told her the price she was a little troubled. Still, there was no way she could go outside the walls and hunt for food for them herself; so she arranged for the day and for tomorrow, and paid the man what he asked.

Returning through the city streets, grey and old, with ancient houses leaning over the streets and the walls closing around her, she felt a little frightened. She realized that she had lost contact with Preciosa before they entered the gates of Nevarsin; the climate here was too cold for a hawk … had Preciosa turned back to a more welcoming climate? The hawk could find no food in the city … there was carrion enough in the streets, she supposed from the smell, but no fresh living food for a hawk. She hoped Preciosa was safe….