The Rose of Sarifal (21 page)

But Gaspar-shen, when he rose to the surface, couldn’t understand what he was hearing, a low, bellowing sound like the moaning of a calf, and then a scraping, squeaking noise. The iron tub was in what had once been a stable. Clothed in just his eel-skin trousers, carrying a towel, he walked through the gallery of wrecked stone stalls so that he could stand in the shadows at the edge of the courtyard and look up at the candlelight in one of the peaked windows of the keep. The sound came from there. Ah, yes, he had heard it before: The sound of his friend rubbing horse hair against catgut strung over an ornate wooden frame.

But there were other noises, too, closer to hand. He stood wiping his head with his towel, gingerly blotting the lips of the wound behind his ear, where the orc had hit him with a cleaver. With his spread fingers he combed back the cilia that looked almost like a ridge of hair down his spine and between his shoulder blades, while lines of energy formed blue-green patterns underneath his skin, always moving, mixing and reforming. But now a thread of scarlet moved over his belly, and he turned away from the music—that was what Lukas called it—toward another source of noise, more urgent and meaningful, and because of that more beautiful to him: someone hammering at the gate.

Caer Moray occupied the top of a low hill. It was a simple structure, a curtain wall between five round towers. Along the north side, built on a pinnacle of raw stone above the rocky beach, emerged the keep, mostly ruined now, as were the galleries and guardhouses that lined the outer walls. The courtyard was full of old stone cisterns, and a well that cut diagonally through the rock, down to a sea cave underneath the pinnacle. The gates were wooden, fifteen feet high, and Gaspar-shen could see immediately they were the weakest part of the fortifications, battered flat during the orc wars and now hastily rebuilt out of the original timbers. The gate was flanked by smaller towers, in the base of which was the postern, which now stood open. Lady Amaranth’s guard of wolf-women had opened it to guide in the survivors from the ports.

With his towel around his neck, Gaspar-shen retrieved his weapons, then climbed the spiral stair up to the battlements so he could watch them come in. Peering through the embrasure, he could see the deep ditch that lined the curtain wall. The postern led into it, below the raised causeway that strethed across the ditch into the gate. Formerly, he guessed, there’d been a drawbridge, which Lady Amaranth had lacked the skill to rebuild. Instead she had filled the gap with rubble. The women, leading or carrying their children, had followed the road from the northwest as it wound down through the hills. Gaspar-shen counted several scores of the Northlanders, barefoot, dressed in their long embroidered skirts, their yellow hair braided or
cut short, their faces pale and exhausted. Behind them, driving them, he could see the wolves coming down out of the woods, the vanguard of the lycanthrope army. They did not attack the women, but held them to their road, chivvying them onward, though Gaspar-shen guessed that if any of the women had stumbled or fallen back, they would have made a quick task of them; now they spread away from the road over the open meadows that led down to the bay east of the castle. They ran back and forth down there in figure eight patterns as if playing a game, as they waited for the rest of the troops to come down through the spruce and cedar trees. The sun was setting behind the ridge.

The women were inside now, the postern locked and barred. Lady Amaranth was below him in the courtyard. Lukas was with her. They were greeting the new arrivals. The genasi watched them for a moment and then turned back to see the lycanthropes, reinforced now, spread out on either side of the causeway and the road, enclosing the walls in a long, ragged, disorganized semicircle from the high ground of the pinnacle to the beach. More and more were slinking down through the trees, and they carried torches. Some dragged loads of fallen wood out of the forest, which they built up in intermittent piles.

Lukas had come up the spiral stair. “It’s the walls,” he said, as he took his place beside him. “They don’t have much in the way of weapons.”

“Nor do we.” Gaspar-shen paused, hawking up moisture and dribbling it off the edge of the embrasure in a long line. Regenerated by his saltwater bath, by
nature he was able to produce a great deal of saliva. He watched it fall out of sight into the ditch, a sequence of tiny glowing spheres. “They could have taken those women,” he said. “Why did they not?”

Lukas strung his bow. “It’s the hunt,” he said. “The quarry’s run to ground.”

The lycanthropes, as the sky grew dark, lit bonfires at the forest’s edge. They built scaffolds, tying the timbers together with vines. Then they brought out some of the men captured in the towns and stripped off their clothes, while Lukas and the genasi watched from the walls. Lady Amaranth was with them. She had sequestered the women in the old banquet hall, below them where there were no windows. She didn’t want them to see her servants and followers as they slipped out of their clothes and began their transformations, a pack of wolves now, massed around the postern and inside the gate.

A few retained their human shape. They lit torches along the circuit of the walls and took their positions in the guard towers. Some joined Gaspar-shen and Lukas above the gate pointing their long, hairy fingers toward the row of bonfires and the men that hung above them now. Above the barking and snarling, gibbering and caterwauling outside the walls, Gaspar-shen could hear the sound of screaming. Lukas drew back his bowstring. The genasi raised his hand. “Too far,” he said—Lukas’s worst of many faults was his sentimentality. Why would he waste arrows in this empty way, to shorten the suffering of men already dead?

Lukas said nothing, only lowered his bow a matter of ten degrees, and shot.

“Stupid,” Gaspar-shen observed, but now he saw, three hundred yards beyond the gate, an open space amid a circle of wolves, and a great beast in the middle of it, a panther, he thought, until the creature rose up on his hind legs like a gorilla, and raised his paws into the air. So, no ordinary animal, and the arrow never reached him, though the shot was true. It exploded, burst into fire like a shooting star, while the beast sank to the ground again.

Lady Amaranth had rejoined them. She had changed into her leather armor, and tied her hair up under her leather cap. She had her own bow, and a wolf-woman behind her carried sheaves of arrows from the storehouse, which she laid out on the battlement. And so Lukas began to shoot in earnest, the great bow humming as he drove the stragglers back beyond range. Some of the wolf-women carried their own bows. The genasi guessed they might be terrible shots.

Five animals were dead in the open meadow, a boar, three wolves, and something Gaspar-shen couldn’t name. Bellowing, a yoked red bull tumbled from the causeway, and as if the sound were some kind of signal, all the other beasts quieted down. The great panther prowled beyond bowshot. He screamed, and the lycanthropes came forward at a run. Some carried the lopped trunks of spruce trees they had cut in the forest, thirty feet long, borne on the backs of a dozen animals. These were the siege ladders, and the lycanthropes set their trunks
into the ditch and set them up against the walls. With superhuman agility they scrambled up them. Once on the rough stones of the upper wall, they scampered up through the embrasures to struggle with the women there. Lady Amaranth was their commander, and she shouted, lit one of her arrows in the torch above her head, and leaned over the battlement to shoot directly down into the ditch.

When he was spitting, Gaspar-shen had seen, lit from the glow of his saliva, a narrow stream in the bottom of the ditch, which he had assumed was sewage from the castle, though he had not caught the scent. But as the flaming arrow fell he guessed it might be something else, a flow of naphthalene from some ancient cistern. With his scimitar in one hand, his short sword in the other, he had jumped onto the parapet and hacked at a trio of wolf-men on the narrow stones as the ditch erupted into fire. Impregnated with naphthalene, the bases of the trees also burst into flame, which climbed up the pitchy bark. Screaming, many of the lycanthropes dropped down into the smoky fire, while the ones that remained above were quickly overwhelmed.

Gaspar-shen could hear the hum of Lukas’s bow. Lady Amaranth was with him. They were shooting onto the causeway where the enemy pressed at the gate. Borne on a flood of outstretched arms, more tree trunks moved slowly from the forest’s edge. Gaspar-shen guessed they would be more careful this time, and perch them from the ditch’s outside lip. The lycanthropes had their own source of fire. They piled brush and timber against the
gate. Two wolf-men labored over the rubble of the old bridge, one carrying a torch, the other a leaking skin of oil. Lukas shot them both, but someone else snatched up the flame.

“Sortie,” Lukas shouted, but Gaspar-shen was already halfway down the stairs to where the wolf guard massed in the courtyard. The edge of his scimitar gleamed with an electric blue. With one hand he unbarred the postern below the gate. Everything outside was red fire and black smoke, except for a line of stone steps that led up to the causeway.

And Lukas was behind him, sword in hand. They hacked their way up to the gate, and when their enemies turned to flee, the wolf-women chased them down. Lukas spilled the skin of oil into the rubble of the causeway, and then pulled away the brush and threw it down into the ditch, where it caught fire. Lady Amaranth gave them cover from above. Then they retreated.

Variations of this same sequence returned during the night. The lycanthropes had hewn new trees and brought them to the wall, to the ditch’s outer lip. Shorter, set at a different angle, these new siege ladders couldn’t reach even the deepest embrasure, so that the wolf-men were vulnerable as they scrambled up the last stones, clinging to the rough masonry. Many died. And in the hours after midnight it began to rain, a steady downpour that extinguished the bonfires and made the rocks slippery.

A hard wind blew off the sea. The waves of lycanthropes, as they dashed themselves against the walls, established a slower rhythm. Finally, toward dawn, Malar himself came to the gate.

But the defenders had suffered too. The ditch now ran with water, and the naphthalene wouldn’t ignite. The last sortie from the postern had ended in disaster. Now the door was locked and barred, but the enemy controlled the causeway and had brought up battering rams. Lady Amaranth watched them from above. Captain Lukas’s strange companion with the glowing skin kept the small door, with what remained of the wolf-women.

The captain was with her. All the arrows from the storeroom had been spent. The weather had made marksmanship difficult, but even so the ditch was full of bodies, the causeway paved with them. Lukas had led the counterattacks along the battlements and had supervised a new tactic. With iron bars they had broken apart some of the crenellations, laboriously built over the past year, and pushed the heavy stones onto the heads of their attackers. Each success tore a new gap in the wall.

But they had not touched the rock over the gate itself, fearing for the integrity of the entire structure. Now, as the enemy regrouped, Lady Amaranth and the captain stood side by side, sometimes looking out, sometimes at each other.

She had lost her cap, and her long wet hair had tumbled down. Her face was smeared with mud, and
she was bleeding from a wound in her shoulder, where one of the wolf-men had stabbed her. She felt close to tears, not just because the small community that she had built was failing, and would fail. Not just because many of the lycanthropes that she had raised up from pups or shoats were wounded or dead. Not just because she now saw she had been crazy to think that she could maintain a citadel of female authority here in this wilderness—where had all the young ones come from, she now asked herself, that she and Esmerella the midwife had birthed in the nursery? Of course—the lycanthropes had been going out into the forests and the fields of their own will to mate with the creatures who were now battering down their doors, surrendering to them one by one in degradation and pain, forced by nature—she herself had not forbidden it. They were not her prisoners.

No, that was the larger truth, too big to think about. But there was a smaller truth also, which had to do with her own citadel. Captain Lukas turned toward her. He also was not looking his best, bleeding from a cut over his eye, one arm hanging awkwardly. His lips were split, his clothes badged with blood. He’d laid his sword along the top of the parapet, and he was smiling at her, a man she scarcely knew, the first man she had ever seen, a man who had put down his life in her defense. Their enemies were endless, surging like the sea below the walls, and doubtless in an hour or two hours they would break through the main gate and overwhelm them. But she had kept a smaller gate inside herself, and this man stood outside it, his blue eyes and dark hair.

“Are you hurt?” he said.

“It’s nothing.”

But she was lying, because she was hurt. It was quiet down below, the noise stifled by the rain, and the preparations for the final attack. And no one was around them on the walls. The lycanthropes tended the wounded. Amaranth crossed the broad, wet stones until she stood facing Lukas, just a few feet away, and then one foot, and then a few inches, and then nothing. Careful not to touch his scarcely healed ribs, she put her hand out.