Hawkmistress! (45 page)

Well, she is not squeamish, she does not mind getting her hands dirty.

Ruyven picked up the thought and said in an undertone, “I told you so. In Tramontana she flies a verrin hawk and trained it herself. To the great dismay, I might add, of Lady Liriel Hastur, who is highest in rank there, and of her Keeper, Lord Doran; who both love hawking but would rather leave their training to the professional falconer.”

“So she is not some soft-handed lady who wishes to be waited on hand and foot,” Romilly said, grudgingly approving. Then she went to finish her work with Temperance, and when she had done, an orderly had brought food and small-beer from the mess, and they sat on the ground and breakfasted, Lady Maura, with no fuss, tucking her skirt under her and eating with her fingers as they did.

When they had finished, Ranald Ridenow appeared with half a dozen men, and the three of them loaded the sentry-birds on to blocks on their horses; the little detachment moved through the just-wakening camp, and took the road east across the desert lands toward the Plains of Valeron.

The Ridenow lord set a hard pace, though Romilly and Ruyven and the soldiers had no trouble keeping up with them. Lady Maura was riding on a lady’s saddle, but she did not complain and managed to keep up. Although she did say to Romilly, at one stop to breathe the horses, “I wish I could wear breeches as you do, Swordswoman. But I have already scandalized my friends and my own Keeper, and I should probably not give them more cause for talk.”

“Ruyven told me you trained a verrin hawk,” Romilly said.

“So I did; how angry everyone was,” Maura said, laughing, “but now, knowing you, Swordswoman, I know I am not the first nor yet the last woman to do so. And I would rather have her trained to my own hand than to a strange falconer’s and then try to transfer her loyalty to me. Sometimes I have actually felt that I am flying with the bird; though perhaps it is my imagination.”

“And perhaps not,” Romilly said, “for I have had that experience.” Suddenly, and with poignant grief, she remembered Preciosa. It had been more than a year that she had dwelt in that damned desert town, and Preciosa had no doubt gone back to the wilds to live, and forgotten her.

Yet, even if I see her no more in life, the moments of closeness we have known are part of me now as then, and there is no such thing as future or past… . For a moment her head swam, and she confused the moment of ecstasy with Preciosa’s flight with that all-consuming moment in which she had ridden Sunstar, joined absolutely with the horse, she flew, she raced, she was one with sky and earth and stars….

“Swordswoman-?” Lady Maura was looking at her, troubled, and Romilly swiftly jerked her awareness back to the moment. She said the first thing that came into her head.

“My name is Romilly, and if we are to work together you need not say Swordswoman, so formally, every time …”

“Romilly,” Maura said with a smile, “and I am Maura; in the Tower we do not think of rank separating friends, and if you are a friend to these birds I am your friend too.”

Then the Towers have something in common with the Sisterhood, she thought, but then Ranald called the men together and they rose to ride again. She wondered why they were going so far ahead of the main army.

All day they rode, and at night made camp; the men and Ruyven slept under the stars, but there was a little tent for Lady Maura, and she insisted that Romilly must share it. They were tired from riding at a hard pace all day, but before they slept, Lady Maura asked quietly, “Why did you never go to a Tower for training, Romilly? Surely you have laran enough.”

“If you know Ruyven, and how he had to come there,” said Romilly, “then you will know already why I did not.”

“Yet you left your home, and quarreled with your kin,” said Maura, quietly insistent, “After that, I should think you would have come at once.”

And so I had intended, Romilly thought. But I made my way on my own, and now have no need of the training the leronis told me I must have. I know more of my own laran than any stranger. She fell into a stubborn silence, and Lady Maura forbore to question her further.

Two days they rode, and they came out of the desert land and into green country; Romilly breathed a sigh of relief when they were able to see hills in the distance, and the evening breath of cool rain. It was high summer, but at this season frost lay on the ground at morning, and she was glad of her fur cloak at night. On the third day, as the road led over a high hill which commanded a view for many leagues around, Ranald Ridenow drew them to a halt.

“This will be the right place,” he said, “Are you ready with the birds?”

Maura evidently knew what was wanted, for she nodded, and asked, “Who will you link with? Orain?”

“Carolin himself,” said the Ridenow lord quietly. “Orain is not head-blind, but has not laran enough for this. And they are his troops.”

Maura was blinking rapidly and looked as if she was about to cry. She said in an undertone, more to herself than Romilly, “I like this not at all, spying upon Rakhal’s movements. I - I swore not to fight against him. But Lyondri has brought all this upon himself, for he too is oath-forsworn! After what he has done … kinsman or no …” and she broke off, pressing her lips tight together and saying, “Romy, will you fly first?”

“But I know not what to do,” Romilly said.

“Yet you are hawkmistress …”

“I know the sentry-birds, habits, diet and health,” said Romilly, “I have not been schooled to their use in warfare. I do not know-“

Maura looked startled, but quickly covered it, and Romilly was amazed; she is being polite to me? She said quietly, “You need only fly the bird and remain in rapport with her, seeing what she sees through her eyes. Ranald will make the link with you and so relay what you have seen to Carolin, so that he can spy out the land ahead and know what are Rakhal’s movements in the land.”

The name sentry-birds suddenly made sense to her, she had never really thought about it before. She took Prudence from the block, loosing with one hand the knots which secured her jesses, and lifted her free; watched her soar high into the sky. She arranged her body carefully in the saddle, leaving a part of her consciousness … a very small part … to make certain she did not fall from the saddle, and then….

… high into the sky, on long, strong winds, rising higher and higher. …

All of the land lay spread out below her, like a map. She could see the curve of water below, and was dimly aware of a presence within her mind, seeing what she saw through her link with the bird. Through this mind, which she recognized as Carolin’s, she began to make sense out of what she saw, although this was very distant and almost unconscious … most of her was soaring with the bird, seeing with keen sharpness everything which lay below.

… There the shores of Mirin Lake, and beyond that, Neskaya to the north, at the edge of the Kilghard Hills. And there … ah, Gods, another circle of blackness, not the scar of forest-fire, but where Rakhal’s men have rained clingfire from the sky from their infernal flying machines! My people and they burn and die beneath Rakha’s fires when it was given to me and I swore with my hand in the fires of Hali that I would protect them against all pillage and rapine while they were loyal to me, and for that loyalty they burn …

… Rakhal, as Aldones lives, I shall burn that hand from you with which you have sown disaster and death on my people … and Lyondri I shall hang like a common criminal for he has forfeited the right to a noble death; the life he now lives as Rakha’s sower of death and suffering is more ignoble than death at the hands of the common hangman….

Over the Kilghard Hills now, where the hills lie green with summer, and the resin-trees blaze in the sun … there again a Tower rises … quickly, fly to the North, little bird, away from the spying eyes of Lyondri’s own forsworn laranzu’in..

And there they lie, Rakhal’s armies, where I can march to the East and take them unawares, unless they can spy with eyes like mine … and I think there are no sentry-birds now except in the far Hellers… .

Romilly heard the shrill crying of the bird as if from her own throat; the contact melted and for a moment she sat on her horse again, Carolin gone from her mind, Ranald Ridenow suddenly jolted out of contact, staring at her. She lurched in the saddle, swayed, and Maura said quietly, “Enough. Ruyven, your turn, I think… .”

Romilly had not noticed; Ruyven had loosed Temperance at the same time as Prudence. Diligence, too, was gone from Maura’s saddle. She saw Ruyven slump … as she had done? .. . and for an instant she was part of Ruyven/Ranald/Carolin flying in rapport with the bird, swooping low over the armies, something inside her counting …

Horsemen and foot soldiers, so many … wagons of supplies, and archers, and … ah Gods … Evanda guard us, that smell I know, somewhere within their ranks they are again making clingfire …

By sheer force of will Romilly tore herself, exhausted, from the rapport. She was not interested in the details of Rakhal’s armies. She would rather not know; the horror she had felt in Ruyven’s mind, or was it Carolin’s, made her feel dizzy and sick. Spent, she collapsed in her saddle, almost asleep where she sat, weak, light-headed. She noticed at the edge of her consciousness that the sun was substantially lowered, almost at the edge of the horizon, and the light was dimming enough so that the great violet disk of Liriel could be seen rising from the eastern horizon, a few nights before its full. Her mouth was dry, and her head ached and throbbed as if a dozen tiny smiths were beating on their forge-anvils inside it.

Darkness descended so swiftly that Romilly wondered if she had been asleep in her saddle; it seemed to her that one moment she looked on sunset and the next, on violet moonlight, with Liriel floating in the sky. As she came aware, she realized Ruyven was looking at her anxiously.

“You’re back?”

“For some time,” he said, surprised. “Here, the soldiers have food ready for you,” He gestured, and she slid from her horse, aching in every muscle, her head throbbing. She did not see Maura at all. Ranald Ridenow came and said, “Lean on me, if you wish, Swordswoman,” but she straightened herself proudly.

“Thank you, I can walk,” she said, and Ruyven came and motioned her to sit beside them on the grass. She protested “The birds-“

“Have been seen to; Maura did it when she saw the state you were in,” he said. “Eat.”

“I’m not hungry,” she said, shrugging it off, and rose swiftly to her feet. “I had better see to Prudence-“

“I tell you, Maura has the birds and they are perfectly all right,” Ruyven said impatiently, and thrust a block of sticky dried fruit into her hand. “Eat this.”

She took a bite of it and put it aside with a grimace. She knew that if she swallowed it she would be sick. From somewhere her little tent had been put up, the one she shared with Maura, and she shoved into it, aware from somewhere of Ranald Ridenow’s face, white and staring, troubled. Why should he care? She flung herself down on her pallet in. the tent and fell over the edge of a dark cliff of sleep.

She knew she had not really wakened, because she could somehow see through the walls of the tent to where her sleeping body lay, all thin like gauze so that she could see through it to beating heart and pulsing veins. She waved a hand and the heart speeded up its beat slightly and the veins began to go in swirling circles. Then she flew away and left it behind her, rising over plains and hills, flying far away on long, strong wings toward the Hellers. Ice cliffs rose before her, and beyond them she could see the walls of a city, and a woman standing on a high battlement, beckoning to her.

Welcome home, dear sister, come here to us, come home…

But she turned her back on them too, and flew onward, higher and higher, mountain peaks dropping away far below, as she flew past the violet disk … no, it was a round ball, a sphere, a little world of its own, she had never thought of the moon as a world. Then a green one lay beneath her, and the peacock crescent of Kyrrdis, dark, lighted only at the rim by the red sun, which somehow was still shining at midnight. She flew on and on, until she left the blazing sun behind and it was only a star among other stars, and she was looking down from somewhere on the world with four moons like a jeweled necklace, and someone said in her mind, Hali is the constellation of Taurus, and Hali the ancient Terran word for necklace in the Arabic tongue, but the words and the worlds were all meaningless to her; she dropped down, down slowly, and the great ship lay smashed against the lower peaks of the Kilghard Hills, and a Ghost wind blew across the peaks… and a little prim voice in her mind remarked, racial memory has never been proven, for there are parts of the brain still inaccessible to science … and then she began to fly along the rim of the Hellers. But the glaciers were breathing their icy breath at her, and her wings were beginning to freeze, the dreadful cold was squeezing her heart, slowing the wing-strokes, and then one wing, hard like ice, broke and splintered, with a dreadful shock of pain in her head and heart, and the other wing, white and frozen and stiff, would no longer beat, and she sank and sank, screaming….

“Romilly! Romilly!” Lady Maura was softly slapping her cheeks. “Wake up! Wake up!”

Romilly opened her eyes; there was a soft lantern-glow in the tent, but through it she was still freezing among the glaciers, and her wings were broken… she could feel the sharp jagged edges near her heart where they had shattered in the cold and splintered away….