Sun Wolf 1 - The Ladies Of Mandrigyn (3 page)

“Ten thousand gold pieces is the ransom of a king,” he began.

“It is the ransom of a city’s freedom!” she bit back at him.

Starhawk was right, he thought. There are other fanatics besides religious ones.

“But it isn’t just the cost of men’s lives,” he returned quietly. “I wouldn’t lead them against Altiokis and they wouldn’t go. It’s autumn already. The storms will break in a matter of days. It’s a long march to Mandrigyn overland through the mountains.”

“I have a ship,” she began.

“You’re not getting me on the ocean at this time of year. I have better things to do with my body than use it for crab food. We’ll be a few days mopping up here, and by then the storms will have started. I’m not waging a winter war. Not against Altiokis—not in the Tchard
Mountains.”

“There’s a woman on board my ship who can command the weather,” Sheera persisted. “The skies will remain clear until we’re safe in port.”

“A wizard?”
He grunted. “Don’t make me laugh. There are no wizards anymore, bar Altiokis himself—and I wouldn’t take up with you if you had one. I won’t mix myself in a wizards’ war.

“And,” he went on, his voice hardening, “I’m not interested in any case. I won’t take ten thousand gold pieces to buy my men coffins, and that’s what it would come to, going against Altiokis, winter or summer, mountains or flatland. Your girlfriend may have seen Tarrin alive, lady, but I’ll wager your ten thousand gold pieces against a plug copper that his brain and his soul weren’t his own. And a plug copper’s all my own life would be worth if I were fool enough to take your poxy money.”

She was on her feet then, her face mottled with rage. “What do you want?” she demanded in a low voice. “Anything.
Me—or any woman in the city or all of us.
Dream-sugar? We can get you a bushel of it if you want it. Slaves? The town crawls with them. Diamonds? Twenty thousand gold pieces . . . ”

“You couldn’t raise twenty thousand gold pieces, woman, I don’t know how you raised ten,” Sun Wolf snapped. “And I don’t touch dream-sugar. You? I’d sooner bed a poisonous snake.”

That touched her on the raw, for she was a woman whom men had begged for since she was twelve. But the rage in her was something more—condensed, like the core of a flame—and it was this that had caused Sun Wolf to speak what sounded like an insult but was, in fact, the literal truth. She was a dangerous woman, passionate, intelligent, and ruthless; a woman who could wait months or years for revenge. Sun Wolf did not rise from his chair, but he gauged the distance between them and calculated how swiftly she might move if she struck.

Then a draft of wild smoky night breathed suddenly through the tent, and Sheera swung around as Starhawk paused in the doorway. For a moment, the women stood facing each other, the one in her dark gown sewn with shadowy opals, with her wild and perilous beauty, the other windburned and plain as bread, her man’s doublet accentuating her wide shoulders and narrow hips, the angular face with its cropped hair. Starhawk’s rolled-back sleeves showed forearms muscled like a man’s, all crimped with pink war scars.

They sized each other up in silence. Then Sheera thrust past Starhawk, through the tent flap, to vanish into the blood-scented night.

The Hawk looked after her in silence for a moment, then turned back to her chief, who still sat in his camp chair, his hands folded before him and his fox-yellow eyes brooding. He sighed, and the tension seemed to ebb from his muscles as much as it ever did on campaign. The door curtain moved again, and Fawn entered, her dark hair fretted to tangles, falling in a soft web over her slender back.

Sun Wolf stood up and shook his head in answer to his lieutenant’s unasked question. “May the spirits of his ancestors,” he said quietly, “help the poor bastard who falls afoul of her.”

Sunlight lay like a thick amber resin on the surface of the council table, catching in a burning line on the brass of its inlay work, like the glare at the edge of the sea. For all the twinge of autumn that spiced the air outside, it was over-warm up here, and the Council of Kedwyr, laced firmly into their sober coats of padded and reinforced black wool, were sweating gently in the magnified sunlight that fell through the great oriel windows. Sun Wolf sat at the foot of the table between the Captain of the Outland Levies and the Commander of the City Guards, his hands folded, the glaring sun catching like spurts of fire on the brass buckles of his doublet, and waited for the President of the Council to try and wriggle out of his contract.

Both the Outland Captain Gobaris and the City Commander Breg had warned him. They themselves fought for Kedwyr largely as a duty fixed by tradition, and their pay was notoriously elastic.

The President of the Council opened the proceedings with a well-rehearsed paean of praise for the Wolf’s services, touching briefly upon his regrets at having had to go to war against such a small neighbor as Melplith at all. He went on to speak of the hardships they had all endured, and Sun Wolf, scanning those pink, sweaty faces and hamlike jowls bulging out over the high-wrapped white neckclothes, remembered the rotten rations and wondered how much these men had made off them. The President, a tall, handsome man with the air of a middle-aged athlete run to fat, came to his conclusion, turned to the ferret-faced clerk at his side, and said, “Now, as to the matter of payment. I believe the sum promised to Captain Sun Wolf was thirty-five hundred gold pieces or its equivalent?”

The man nodded in agreement, glancing down at the unrolled parchment of the contract that he held in his little white hand.

“In the currency of the Realm of Kedwyr . . . ” the President began, and Sun Wolf interrupted him, his deep rumbling voice deceptively lazy.

“The word ‘equivalent’ isn’t in my copy of the contract.”

He reached into the pouch on his belt and pulled out a much-folded wad of parchment. As he deliberately spread it out on the surface of the table before him, he could see the uneasy glance that passed among the councilmen. They had not thought that he could read.

The President’s wide smile widened. “Well, of course, it is understood that—”

“I didn’t understand it,” Sun Wolf said, still in that mild tone of voice. “If I had meant ‘gold or local,’ I’d have specified it. The contract says ‘gold’—and by international contractual law, gold is defined by assay weight, not coinage count.”

In the appalled silence that followed. Captain Gobaris of the Outland Levies leaned his chin on his palm in such a way that his fingers concealed the grin that was struggling over his round, heavy face.

The President gave his famous, glittering smile. “It’s a pleasure to deal with a man of education, Captain Sun Wolf,” he said, looking as if he would derive even greater pleasure from seeing Sun Wolf on board a ship that was headed straight for the rocks that fringed Kedwyr’s cliffs. “But as a man of education, you must realize that, because of the disrupted conditions on the Peninsula, assay-weight gold coinage is in critically short supply. The balance of imports and exports must be reestablished before our stockpiles of gold are sufficient to meet your demands.”

“My demands,” Sun Wolf reminded him gently, “were made six months ago, before the trade was disrupted.”

“Indeed they were, and you may be sure that under ordinary circumstances our treasuries would have been more than sufficient to give you your rightful dues in absolute weight coinage. But emergency contingencies arose which there was no way to foresee. The warehouse fires on the silk wharves and the failure of the lemon crops on which so much of our export depends caused shortages in the treasury which had to be covered from funds originally earmarked for the war.”

Sun Wolf glanced up. The ceiling of the council hall was newly gilded—he’d watched the workmen doing it, one afternoon when he’d been kept kicking his heels here for an hour and a half trying to see the President about the rations the Council members had been selling them.

Gilding was not cheap.

“Nevertheless,” the President went on, leaning forward a little and lowering his voice to a confiding tone, which the Outland Captain had told Sun Wolf meant he was about to tighten up the screws, “we should be able to meet the agreed-upon amount in gold coinage in four weeks, when the amber convoys come in from the mountains. If you are willing to wait, all can be arranged to your satisfaction.”

Except that my men and I will not be stuck on the hostile Peninsula for the winter,
the Wolf thought dryly. If they were paid promptly and left at the end of this week, they might make it over the Gniss
River, which separated the Peninsula from the rolling wastelands beyond, before it became impassable with winter floods. If they waited four weeks, the river would be thirty feet higher than it was now in the gorges, and the Silver Hills beyond clogged with snow and blistered by winds. If they waited four weeks to be paid, many of the men might never make it back to winter quarters in Wrynde at all.

He folded his hands and regarded the President in silence. The moment elongated itself uncomfortably into a minute, then two. The next offer would be for local currency, of course—stipulated at a far higher rate than he could get in Wrynde. Silver coinage tended to fluctuate in value, and right now the silver content wasn’t going to be high. But he let the silence run on, knowing the effect of it on men already a little nervous about that corps of storm troops camped by the walls of Melplith.

It was General Gradduck, the head of all the Kedwyr forces who had taken most of the credit for breaking the siege, who finally spoke. “But if you are willing to accept local currency . . . ” he began, and left the bait dangling.

They expected the Wolf to start grudgingly stipulating silver content on coinage—impossible to guarantee unless he wanted to have every coin assayed individually. Instead he said, “You mean you’d like to renegotiate the contract?”

“Well—” the President said, irritated.

“Contractually, you’re obligated for gold,” Sun Wolf said. “But if you are willing to renegotiate, I certainly am. I believe, in matters regarding international trade, the custom in the Peninsula is to impanel a jury of impartial representatives of the other states hereabouts, to determine equivalent local currency values for thirty-five hundred in gold.”

The President did not quite turn pale at the thought of representatives from the other Peninsular states setting the amount of money he’d have to pay this mercenary and his men. The other states, already alarmed by Kedwyr’s attack on its rival Melplith, would love to be given the opportunity to disrupt Kedwyr’s economy in that fashion—not to mention doing Sun Wolf a favor that could be tendered as part of the payment the next time they needed a mercenary troop.

He was clearly sorry he had mentioned it.

A pinch-faced little councilman down at the end of the table quavered, “Of all the nerve!”

The President forced one last smile. “Of course, Captain, such negotiations could be badly drawn out.”

Sun Wolf nodded equably. “I realize the drain that’s already been put on you by our presence here. I’m sure my men could be put up in some other city in the vicinity, such as Ciselfarge.”

It had been a toss-up whether Kedwyr would invade Melplith or Ciselfarge in this latest power struggle for the amber and silk trades, and Sun Wolf knew it. If the President hadn’t just returned from swearing lasting peace and brotherhood with Ciselfarge’s prince, the remark could have been construed as an open threat.

Grimly, the President said, “I am sure that such a delay will not be necessary.”

The bar of sunlight slid along the table, glared for a time in Sun Wolf’s eyes, then shifted its gleam to the wall above his head. Servants came in to light the lamps before the negotiations were done. Once or twice, Sun Wolf went down to the square outside the Town Hall to speak to the men he’d brought into the town with him, ostensibly to make sure they weren’t drinking themselves insensible in the taverns around the square, but in fact to let them know he was still alive. The men, like most of the Wolf’s men, didn’t drink nearly as much as they seemed to—this trip counted as campaign, not recreation.

The third time the Wolf came down the wide staircase, it was with the fat Captain Gobaris of the Outland Levies and the thin, bitter, handsome Commander Breg of the Kedwyr City Guards. The Outland Captain was chuckling juicily over the discomfiture of the Council at Sun Wolf s hands. “I thought we’d lose our President to the apoplexy, for sure, when you specified the currency had to be delivered tomorrow.”

“If I’d given him the week he’d asked for, he’d have had time to get another run of it from the City Mint,” the Wolf said reasonably. “There’d be half the silver content of the current coins, and he’d pay me off in that.”

The Guards Commander glanced sideways at him with black, gloomy eyes. “I suspect it’s what he did last year, when the city contracts were signed,” he said. “We contracted for five years at sixty stallins a year, and that was when stallins were forty to a gold piece. Within two months they were down to sixty-five.”

“Oh, there’s not much I wouldn’t put past that slick bastard.” Gobaris chuckled as they stepped through the great doors. Before them, the town square lay in a checkwork of moonlight and shadow, bordered with the embroidered gold of a hundred lamps from the taverns that rimmed it. Music drifted on the wind, with the smell of the sea.

No,
Sun Wolf thought, signaling to his men. And that’s why I didn’t come to this town alone.

They left their places in the open tavern fronts and drifted toward him across the square. Gobaris scratched the big hard ball of his belly, and sniffed at the wild air. “Winter rains are holding off,” he judged. “They’re late this year.”

“Odd,” the commander said. “The clouds have been piling up on the sea horizon, day after day.”

Obliquely, it crossed Sun Wolf’s mind that the woman Sheera had spoken of having someone on board her ship who could command the weather. A wizard?
he wondered. Impossible.
Then his men were around him, grinning, and he raised his thumbs in a signal of success. There were ironic cheers, laughter, and bantering chaff, and Sheera slipped from the Wolf’s mind as Gobaris said, “Well, that’s over, and a better job of butchery on a more deserving group of men I’ve never seen. Come on, Commander,” he added, jabbing his morose colleague in the ribs with an elbow. “Is there anyplace in this town a man can get some wine to wash out the taste of them?”