Women of War (5 page)

Tiger. No creature of sorcery, but Death in a gray dappled coat. She'd seen them in the east. Over mountains and rivers, beyond lakes wide enough to fool the eye that there was no other side, at the far side of deserts burnished bright and hard as glass, there was a place where cats with teeth as long as knives hunted men: a land whose forests stretched like feasting-halls from mountain to desert. Men did not rule there.

This was not a land for tiger. Perhaps some tribute-wagon bound for Alarra had disgorged its cargo untimely.

She looked about for a place to tie her horse, and finally wedged its reins beneath a boulder far enough from its dead fellow that it wouldn't, probably, choose to bolt.

The ashwood spears would be useless. They would kill wolf and boar, but not tiger. She left them with the horse. Then she pulled Shadowkiss from its sheath and walked slowly forward, studying the ground for signs. The sword hoarded daylight, giving it back in ocean-colored fire, and the print of the wide clawed pads was blatant in the blood-muddied dust.

Then she heard a low coughing growl.

It had cost him dear, but Moonflute had freed his leg. He could not stand, but he could crawl, and the gilt of his sword-hilt glittered among the fallen leaves.

His sword arm was useless; bruised to aching numbness in the fall and clawed by the monster besides. He did not think about that. Only the sword mattered.

At last he could clasp his fingers about it, and rolled onto his back, panting with exhaustion, drawing his sword awkwardly to him with the hand he could still use.

And stared once more into the eyes of the Monster of Paloe.

It was as if someone had taken the small cats of the forest and somehow made them bigger than stags. Its fur was the ash gray of a dying fire, and upon that ash lay the spots and stripes of a gray darker still. From its upper jaw hung two enormous fangs as long as his hand.

It crouched in the brush a few yards farther down the slope. Only its eyes betrayed it to his sight: pale and inhuman as death, they glittered in the autumn sun. It watched him unmoving. Soon it would rush forward, and his brief life would be over.

No one would know that he had lived, or how he had died.

Slowly, painfully, he pulled his sword upward.

 

The flash of light on metal caught Ruana's eye.

The dead horse's rider was still alive.

Farther down the slope, she saw the tiger in the brush. In a moment it would charge.

She had seen tiger killed in the east. They had been trapped in pits, or caught with nets. To take them on the ground—as she had seen nobles try for sport—required aliphaunts and archers, packs of dogs in armor, horses trained from foalhood.

But it was intent upon its prey, and that gave her a chance. It would kill the boy, and for a few brief instants it would be distracted. She could make her try for it then. He was only a boy, she thought, with a brief hard life to him. Why should she interfere, when all the years he could expect were a handful to those she had already lived? How could he mind losing such a little thing?

:Let him be,:
agreed the sword in her hand.
:He would not want to meet a legend.:

No!
she answered, seeing the long-woven trap at last. How many years since she'd taken her sword—god-sword, hell-sword, lover, and curse—and gone roving? There was always legend for idle hands to weave. But when all those years had worked on her, what was left to speak for humanity against the will of the gods? What was left of what she had been to do battle with the sword?

“Nae this time, ye poxy piece ae glass!” Ruana raised Shadowkiss in her hand and ran down the hill toward the boy and the Paloe Cat.

The boy was down but game, holding his sword in his off hand like a spear while blood rilled down the useless sword hand and pattered on the earth. The cat snarled when it saw Ruana. It would not charge in the face of this new thing.

But neither would it flee.

“Nae this time!” she shouted again, and ran at the crouching spotted shape.

It was large, and savage, and not afraid of Man. It unsheathed talons longer than her fingers and slashed at Ruana, wailing.

But Shadowkiss was there instead of living flesh.

The blade did not bite deep, but the small pain it gave was enough. The beast doubled back on its haunches and sprang.

And then the sword sheathed itself in the creature's belly and slid out gaudily red behind the shoulder, sliding down through the beast's vitals as it fought to get at her.

And Ruana knew that despite all this it would not die before it killed her—for if she could not age, then she could surely die, if her guts were scattered upon the earth.

There was crushing weight, and heat, and then cold.

And then the dark.

Mind returned, and before she had the sense of her body she groped with numb fingers until she encountered the checked bone hilt of Shadowkiss, laid across her as if for a lorder's funeral.

She was not dead.

 

She grunted, and rolled to her knees.

She was red with tiger blood, but its terrible hind claws had not done their mortal work, for the god-sword had severed the monster's spine. Its foul weight had crushed the breath from her lungs as it had died atop her. That was all.

And then someone had pulled it off.

The boy—he had a man's growth, perhaps, but he was still a boy to her—knelt in the blood-soaked leaves a few feet away, cradling his useless arm in his lap. His sword lay beside him on the ground. His hand was wet with the tiger's blood.

He looked up and met her eyes.

She knew those eyes. They were a little darker than amber. She had seen them first in a room when Corchado was a power in the land, when the Gray Duke's word was law.

When the Gray Duke had sought to take Shadowkiss for himself, but trusted a hero instead.

How many years, how many lives, between those eyes and these?

“Ah kent tha braw eld granther, hinny,” she said, slipping into the tongue she had spoken as a child.

The boy stared at her, his eyes glazed with pain and shock. Plainly, he had not understood. Well, they all spoke an uncouth tongue in the South.

Carefully, Ruana got to her feet. “Whit ik tha nam?” she asked. She shook her head to clear it. “Thy name? How art tha called?”

“Moonflute,” the boy said, a note of reluctant defiance in his voice. “I seek the Starharp.”

And Ruana Rulane began to laugh, harshly, like a battlefield crow. For Shadowkiss was the Starharp, and always had been, and he had found what he sought.

 

She cleaned the glass-green blade and sheathed it, then carried Moonflute up the hill. Along the way, they found his dagger.

She cleaned and bound his wounds with bandages from her packs, and gave him water and wine from his own supplies. She found a level place to camp a little farther from the dead horse, where she could tie her own horse securely, and brought him there. She went back to his horse, and brought away all that could be usefully brought.

Then she made a fire, and settled down to cook.

She felt him watching her.

She knew what he thought and what he guessed. Loyt had guessed. And she knew the boy's name. Moonflute. Seeker of the Starharp.

Seeker of Shadowkiss.

He would know its legends. Most of the legends were even true.

More or less.

When the meat was roasted, she cut it into two portions and offered him one. If he knew he was eating his horse, Moonflute didn't mention the fact.

Day waned into evening, then into night. Ruana Rulane rolled herself into her blankets and slept.

 

All the brief years of his life he'd intended to become a hero, a legend. Now Moonflute was confronted with legend in the flesh: this silent woman who had—so simply!—saved him from death.

And who carried in her hand a thing out of singer's tales, a glass-green blade set with rubies, a blade that had slain ghosts and dragons, the sword that Chayol Rising Star had once carried into battle.

He knew what it was: the god-sword Shadowkiss, ornate legend from the Eastern Kingdoms. His heart's desire and suicide, all in one hawk's wing sweep of shimmering ocean blade.

A blade carried by an immortal queen—Ruana Rulane, the Twiceborn.

She did not look like an immortal queen.

She spoke like a peasant—when she spoke at all. Her leathers were worn and scarred with use, and her boots were shabby. Her cloak was dusty and mended. Her horse was little better than a mountain pony, a beast he'd be ashamed to ride.

A hurt too deep to name ate at him until sleep pulled him deep.

She woke an hour before dawn, as the fire guttered to embers. Ruana quickly added wood to waken it. They could cook the rest of the meat for breakfast; if she put Moonflute on her horse they would reach Paloe by midday....

Or she could saddle up and ride away now.

He wanted Shadowkiss. She had seen it in his eyes last night. If she left him at Paloe, he would follow her. He would follow her until he died.

Or until the moment he touched the sword.

She sighed, shaking her head sadly. She'd expected to feel amusement from the sword—saving the boy had been futile after all—but instead all she sensed was a faint flicker of—regret?

And a sense that Shadowkiss was gathering its energies in a way that the god-sword had never gathered them before.

If she had saved Moonflute from the tiger, she had also doomed him. One man in ten thousand looked upon what she carried with lust, yet none could claim Shadowkiss while she lived, for the god-sword had chosen her, and their partnership would endure until the end of the world.

:Let him choose,:
the sword whispered to her.
:Let him choose.:

Leave now, and he would die here, alone, for his ankle was yet too tender to bear his weight. Take him to Paloe, and he would follow her—and die.

:He has a choice,:
the sword urged.
:He still has a choice.:

He's young,
Ruana thought, with something close to despair. She thought of years squandered like water poured out upon parched earth, as Moonflute chased a dream that fled forever just out of reach.

Unable to stop.

Unable to choose.

She unsheathed Shadowkiss and struck the blade into the earth.

The smell of roasting meat roused Moonflute to wakefulness. He startled up all at once, the pain of bruised muscles reminding him of where he was.

But he had eyes only for the sword.

Shadowkiss stood quivering in the earth where Ruana Rulane had sheathed it, green-glowing and jeweled red.

Death to touch.

“Take it,” Ruana said evenly. “An' tha wilt.”

He stared at her, wondering if this were a trick.

“You ... you're
giving
it to me?” he asked.

“Nay. I canna do that. An' tha take it, that's thy choice to make. Tha kens what will happen an' tha try, Moonflute.”

He knew. He knew what she was offering him. And the only choice he had to make was: die or change.

Choose life instead of legend, and carry the memory of the choice with him forever, to taint and twist and moderate every heroic act for the rest of his life.

Or usurp the sword. Its touch would kill him instantly. But every choice he had ever made had led him here, and legends did not turn back.

A morning-bird called, and suddenly life was sweet, and every momentary physical pleasure he had ever tasted came back to him, warm and vivid and repeatable, if only he lived.

Slowly, he levered himself to his feet with his own scab-barded sword. He reached out his hand.

And the sword spoke to him.

“I won't!” said Moonflute, stung. And before he knew he had chosen he drew back.

Ruana took up the sword again, sheathed it, and the look she gave Shadowkiss made Moonflute feel he was seeing what he was not meant to see.

“Thy leg is nae hale enough for standing. Sit,” she said, squatting again before the fire.

He did as he was told, and when they had finished their breakfasts, she helped him to mount her horse, and they rode toward Paloe.

“Happen it be there's a horse to spare in Paloe for the siller,” she said, walking beside him, “an' the villagers will want to see that yon cat is dead. Tha can bring thy saddle along then. 'Tis a fine brave thing, an' tha would not wish to see it lost.”

“It's all I own,” Moonflute said bleakly. His saddlebags were slung over the pony's withers, and his saddle blanket was lashed behind the saddle.
It's all I am.

It had never occurred to him to wonder if there might be an end to his story that was not death. He had been offered that ending, pat as a verse in a singer's tale, and refused it. He did not want to be an aside in the Song of the Twiceborn, a joke tossed off across the strings of the
loyt
to make men laugh into their cups.

He still wanted to be a hero.

They reached Paloe at midday, as Ruana had thought they would. She told them the beast was dead.

She left Moonflute behind in the village and took a couple of the villagers and several horses back with her to where the tiger lay. They returned at dusk with the remains of Paloe's monster lashed to two of the horses and Moonflute's saddle upon another.

 

The villagers spiked the tiger's head on a post at the gateway of the village; in a few weeks there would be nothing left but a clean-picked skull and a story to frighten the children. Perhaps in the spring Loyt would come to hear it, and make another song.