Hawkmistress! (42 page)

Was this, Romilly wondered, the reason why The MacAran had quarreled with the Towers, why Ruyven had had to run away, and he had driven the leronis from his home without giving her leave to test Romilly and Mallina for laran! Laran warfare, even the little she had seen of it, was terrifying.

Orain said soberly, “Carolin has said he will not fight that kind of war unless it is used against him. But if Rakhal has laranzu’in to bring against his armies, then he must do what he must; you know that as well as I, Janni.” He sighed. “You had better come and tell him what you learned in Hali, though the news will make him sorrowful. As for Romilly-” he turned and considered her for a moment, “The bird-handlers’ quarters are yonder,” he said, pointing. “The bird-master and his apprentice have that tent there, and no doubt you will find them both around behind it. This way, Janni.”

Jandria and Orain went off arm-in-arm toward the central tent where the banner flew, and Romilly went on in the indicated direction, feeling shy and afraid. How was she to talk to a strange laranzu? Then she straightened her back and drew herself up proudly. She was a MacAran, a Swordswoman, and a hawkmistress; she need not be afraid of anyone. They had summoned her to their aid, not the other way round. Behind the tent she saw a roughly dressed lad of thirteen or so, carrying a great basket, and if she had not seen him she could have smelled him, for it stank of carrion. On heavy perches she saw three familiar, beautiful-ugly forms, and hurried to them, laughing.

“Diligence! Prudence, love!” She held out her hands and the birds made a little dipping of their heads; they knew her again, and the old, familiar rapport reached out, clung. “And where is Temperance? Ah, there you are, you beauty!”

“Don’t get too close to them,” a somehow-familiar voice said behind her, “Those creatures can peck out your eyes; the apprentice there lost a finger-nail to one of them yesterday!”

She turned and saw a slight, bearded man, in the dark robes not unlike those of a monk at Nevarsin, scowling down at her; then it seemed as if the strange bearded face dissolved, for she knew the voice, and she cried out, incredulous.

“Ruyven! Oh, I should have known, when they said it was a laranzu from Tramontana - Ruyven, don’t you know me?”

She was laughing and crying at once, and Ruyven stared down at her, his mouth open.

“Romy,” he said at last. “Sister, you are the last person in the world I would have expected to see here! But - in this garb-” he looked her up and down, blushing behind the strangeness of the beard. “What are you doing? How came you-“

“I was sent to handle the birds, silly,” she said, “I bore them all the way from the foothills of the Hellers into Nevarsin, and from Nevarsin to Caer Donn. See, they know me.” She gestured, and they made little clucking noises of pleasure and acknowledgement. “But what are you doing here, then?”

“The same as you,” he said. “The Lord Orain’s son and I are bredin; he sent word to me, and I came to join Carolin’s army. But you-” he looked at the dress of the Sisterhood with surprise and distaste, “Does Father know you are here? How did you win his consent?”

“The same way you won consent from him to train your laran within the walls of Tramontana Tower,” she said, grimacing, and he sighed.

“Poor father. He has lost both of us now, and Darren-” he sighed. “Ah, well. Done is done. So you wear the earring of the Sisterhood, and I the robes of the Tower, and both of us follow Carolin - have you seen the king?”

She shook her head. “No, but I travelled for a time with his followers, Orain and Dom Carlo of Blue Lake.”

“Carlo I know not. But you handle sentry-birds? I remember you had always a deft hand with horses and hounds, and . I suppose hawks as well, so the MacAran Gift should fit you to handle these. Have you had laran training then, Sister?”

“None; I developed it by working with the beasts and the birds,” she said, and he shook his head, distressed.

“Laran untrained is a dangerous thing, Romy. When this is ended, I will find a place for you in a Tower. Do you realize, you have not yet greeted me properly.” He hugged her and kissed her cheek. “So: you know these birds? So far I have seen none but Lord Orain who could handle them.”

“I taught him what he knows of sentry-birds,” Romilly said, and went to the perches, holding out her hand; with her free hand she jerked the knot loose, and Prudence made a quick little hop to sit on her wrist. She should have brought a proper glove. Well, somewhere in Carolin’s camp there must be a proper falconer’s glove.

And that made her think, with sudden pain, of Preciosa. She had had no sight of the hawk since they came into this drylands country. But then, Preciosa had left her before they came to the glaciers, and rejoined her again when she had returned to the green hills. It might be that Preciosa would return to her, some day …

… and if not, she is free … a free wild thing, belonging to the winds of the sky and to herself. …

“Can you get me a glove?” she asked, “I can, if I must, handle Prudence with my bare hands, because she is small and gentle, but the others are heavier and have not such a delicate touch.”

“That creature, delicate?” Ruyven said, laughing, then the smile slid off as he saw how serious she was. “Prudence, you call her? Yes, I will send my helper for a glove for you, and then you must tell me their names and how you tell them apart.”

The morning passed quickly, but they spoke only of the birds; not touching at all on their shared past, or on Falconsward. At midday a bell was rung, and Ruyven, saying that it was dinnertime in the army mess, told her to come along.

“There are others of the Sisterhood in the camp,” he said, “They sleep in their hostel in the city - but I dare say you know more about them than I. You can eat at their table, if you will - and I suppose it would be better, since they do not mix with the regular soldiers except when they must, and you cannot explain to the whole army that you are my sister.”

She joined the long lines of the army mess, taking her bread and stew to the separate table with the seven or eight women of the Sisterhood who were employed with the army - mostly as couriers, or as trainers of horses or instructors in unarmed combat - one, in fact, as an instructor in swordplay. Some of the women she had met in the hostel and none of them seemed even slightly surprised to see her there. Jandria did not appear. Romilly supposed that she had been kept with Lord Orain and the higher officers, who evidently had their mess apart.

“What are you doing?” one asked her, and she replied briefly that she had been sent for to work with sentry-birds.

“I thought that was work for lerosin,” one of the women remarked, “But then you have red hair, are you too laran-gifted?”

“I have a knack for working with animals,” Romilly said, “I do not know if it is laran or something else.” She did not want to be treated with the distant awe with which they regarded the leroni. When she had finished her meal she rejoined Ruyven at the bird-handlers’ quarters, and by the end of the day he was handling the birds as freely as she did herself.

Dusk was falling, and they were settling the birds on then’ perches, to be carried in under the tent-roof, when Ruyven looked up.

“King Carolin’s right-hand man,” he said briefly, “We see Carolin’s self but seldom; word comes always through Lord Orain. You know him, I understand.”

“I travelled with him for months; but they thought me a boy,” Romilly said, without explaining. Orain came to them and said to Ruyven, ignoring Romilly, “How soon will the birds be ready for use?”

“A tenday, perhaps.”

“And Derek has not yet arrived,” said Orain, scowling. “Do you think you could persuade the leronis …”

Ruyven said curtly, “The battlefield is no place for the Lady Maura. Add to that, Lyondri is of her kin; she said she would handle the birds but she made me promise to her that she would not be asked to fight against him. I blame her not; this war that sets brother against brother, father against son, is no place for a woman.”

Orain said, with his dry smile, “Nor for a man; yet the world will go as it will, and not as you or I would have it. This war was not of my making, nor of Carolin’s. Nevertheless, I respect the sentiments of the Lady Maura, so we must have another to fly the sentry-birds. Romilly-” he looked down at her, and for a moment there was a trace of the old warmth in his voice, “Will you fly them for Carolin, then, my girl?”

So when he wants something from me, he can be halfway civil, even to a woman? Anger made her voice cold. She said, “As for that, vai dom, you must ask my superiors in the Sisterhood; I am apprentice, and my will does not rule what I may do.”

“Oh, I think Jandria will not make trouble about that,” Orain said, smiling. “The Sisterhood will lend you to us, I have no doubt at all.”

Romilly bowed without answering. But she thought, not if I have anything to say about it.

They rode back to the hostel in the light of the setting sun, the sky clear and cloudless; Romilly had never ceased to miss the evening rain or sleet in the hills. It still seemed to her that the country here was dry, parched, inhospitable. Jandria tried to talk a little of the army, of the countryside, to point out to Romilly the Great House of Serrais, perched on the low hillside, where the Hastur-kind had established their seat, as at Thendara and Hali and Aldaran and Carcosa in the hills; but Romilly was silent, hardly speaking, lost in thought.

Ruyven is no longer the brother I knew; we can be friendly now but the old closeness is gone forever. I had hoped he would understand me, the conflicts that drove me from Falconsward - they are like his own. Once he could see me simply as Romilly, not as his little sister. Now - now all he sees is that I have become a Swordswoman, hawkmistress …no more than that.

Even when I lost Falconsward, father, mother, home- I thought that when I again met with Ruyven we would be as we were when we were children. Now Ruyven too is forever gone from me.

I have nothing now; a hawk and my skills with the sword and with the beasts. They reached the hostel, where supper was long over, but one of the women found them something in the kitchens. They went to their beds in silence; Jandria, too, was wrapped in thoughts which, Romilly thought, must be as bitter as her own.

Damn this warfare! Yes, that is what Ruyven said, and Orain too. It may be that father was right … what does it matter which great rogue sits on the throne or which greater rogue seeks to wrest it from him?

Every day, Romilly worked first with the other horses, who were simpler to handle because they were less intelligent; they seemed to have less initiative. Sunstar she saved as a reward for herself at the end of a long morning of working with the other horses, directing her assistants in exercising them and personally supervising their gaits and the speed with which they had been broken to saddle and riding gear. She knew that she was only one of the army horsetrainers in Serrais who had been engaged by Carolin to produce the cavalry for his armies - she saw some of the others, sometimes, come out from the city of Serrais and working on the plains. But she would have been a fool not to know that her horses were trained fastest and best.

Now, at the near end of a long morning, she walked around her little domain, with a pat and a touch on the nose, blissful moment of emotional rapport with each of her horses. She loved every one, she felt the bittersweet knowledge that soon she would have to part with them; but every one of them would carry some of herself wherever Carolin’s armies might ride. Touch after touch, a hug around a sleek neck or a stroking of a velvety nose, and each moment of rapport building her awareness higher, higher yet, till she was dizzied with it, with the sense of racing in the sun, the awareness of running at full stretch on four legs, not two, the mastery of the burden of the rider with its own delight, and somewhere at the back of her mind Romilly felt as if each of these beasts bearing its rider knew something of the inward lightness of the Bearer of Burdens who, said in the writings of the sainted Valentine, bore alone the weight of the world. She was each horse in turn, knowing its rebellions, its discipline and submission, the sense of working in perfect unity with what was allotted to it.

Blurrily, she thought, perhaps only horses know what true faith may be as they share with the Bearer of Burdens … and yet I, only human, have been chosen to share and to know this. … it was easier to be carried away in union and rapport with the horses than with hawks or even the more brilliant sentry-birds, because, she thought, horses had a keener intelligence. The birds, sensitive as they were, blissful as it was to share the ecstasy of flight, still had only limited awareness, mostly focused in their keener eyesight. The sensual awareness was greater in the horses because they were more organized, more intelligent, a human style of awareness and yet not quite human.

And now at the end of her morning, when the other horses had been led away, she brought out Sunstar from his place. He worked so closely with her now that a bare word summoned him, and a part of her flooded out in love, she was the horse, she felt the saddle slipped over her own back as she caressed the leather straps of it, she was in a strange doubled consciousness.

She did not know whether she climbed into the saddle or accepted the grateful weight on her own back. Part of her was sunk joyously into her own body awareness, but that was all swallowed up in the larger consciousness of striding free, racing with the wind … so balanced, so fused into the horse that for a long time she was hardly aware of which was herself, which Sunstar. Yet for all the blurring she felt she had never been so precisely and wholly herself, flooded with a kind of reality she had never known. The heat of the sun, sweat streaming down her flanks, her exquisite leaning to balance from above the weight she felt from below, from within. Time seemed divided into infinitesimal fragments, to each of which she gave its true weight, with no thought of past or future, all gathered up into the absolute present.