Women of War (4 page)

And there was still work for a hero.

Bandits to be rousted out (a drawn-out and thankless task, that, and a new set always came from somewhere), dragons to slay (she had not seen any in years, thank whatever gods you choose), corrupt overlords to oppose (though the Alarine bureaucracy saw to it that no vassal lorder managed to grow too fat on Imperial property), and, always, the little wars between town and town.

But because of the sword she carried, she chose her quarrels carefully. And somehow, when word got around that Ruana Rulane the Twiceborn had come with the god-sword Shadowkiss to settle the matter of who owned fifty hectares of bottom land and the irrigation rights to a stream, the contestants decided to resort to lawyers instead of lances. She could not remember the last time she had drawn her sword in such a dispute.

Once the thought might have irked her. But that was a long time ago.

The years passed, but Ruana Rulane did not change. Such was her nature; Shadowkiss had taken her as its companion, and the sword's companion would live until the end of the world.

Once that would not have been long. A lesser guardian than Ruana would have gone drunk on the magic of holding in his hands a true solid bit of what came before Time; a weapon forged to fight gods' wars for them. And then Shadowkiss would have offered that man glory, or vengeance, or truth, or love, bending him slowly to the delicious work of annihilation. And that sword and that paladin, in merciless inevitable stages, would have slain the world. Such was the nature of the sword the gods forged.

But Ruana Rulane was different. She was a hero, but she was no man. And so the dazzling abstract lures Shadowkiss could offer held less power over her. She would not give the sword its proper employment. She would not turn it to the butcher-work of war.

She asked it—why?

What is the purpose of destruction, when it is neither end nor means? Why is war better than nurture? How does vengeance serve the common good? Why is honor worth more than life? What good is glory?

If not me, who? If not now, when?

And the sword answered. And every answer it gave, she challenged, and mocked, and asked again. Until, slowly, the nature of the answers the sword gave changed.

But so slowly.

Living things learn, she had told a man once. He had said her hellblade lived and so must die. But Shadowkiss could be neither destroyed nor defeated. For the sword to live, it must change.

And so Ruana went about her inglorious work; delivered babies, fed the hungry, irritated the mighty. And bore with her the changeling weapon that was curse, sword, and lover.

Shadowkiss.

 

She was heading westward, back toward the border town of Corchado, when she first heard about the Monster of Paloe.

She'd stopped for the night at an inn; gave a coin to the ostler to stable her horse and walked into the common room. Shadowkiss was slung across her back; awkward, but needs must when the sword was longer than her leg.

Conversation stopped when she came in. The inn's occupants judged her: not tall enough for a man, beardless as a boy, obviously neither. Conversation started again, subfusc, as the tavernmaster came out from behind his bar.

“And what is it you want here, gelding?”

Ruana smiled without mirth. “Why, goodman, nae more than tha can provide: dinner and bed and stabling for my horse. My name is Rulane Twiceborn.”

Years ago—how many now?—that name would have made men pale in terror, but the tavernmaster simply frowned, as if he were trying to remember something he'd learned long ago and since forgotten.

He tried to find something to take offense at, but the stranger with the songsmith name only asked what he was in the business of providing; and the coin she put into his hand was sound, if its stamping was strange. Ruana took her place by the fire and her peggin of beer and settled in to hear the gossip of the road.

But all the inn's inhabitants weren't so incurious as the tapster. There was a conferring and a jostling at the far end of the room where the regulars gathered, and eventually—she watched it all, with a sense of amused inevitability—they sent their delegate to try her.

He was a tall man, and southern-dark. A fairing-ring glistened in one ear, the copper showing through the gold in places. His teeth were sound and white. He dandled a small instrument of a type becoming more common now: the strings of the harp-bow extended beyond it, down a long neck fraught with tuning frets.

“I am Loyt Singerson,” he said, “and I think you are a legend.”

“An' legends drink beer,” Ruana answered, “then there be many a legend here tonight.”

Singerson smiled. “So they may say in the North. In the South, they say legend is bound in the strings of the harp. My poor
loyt
is not a harp, but she will serve for a song.”

He set a wooden bowl upon the table, and put his foot upon the bench where Ruana sat to steady his instrument, and swept his hand across its strings. All around him, talk quieted as the first notes struck the air.

He sang of kings out of Lostland, of changeling children who found their way home only to find home gone to dust with time. He sang of heroes, of dragonslayers, and a queen who had taken a sword for a lover.

A person with a suspicious mind, Ruana decided, might think that last tale based on herself.

By the time his singing was done, Loyt's wooden bowl was full with copper coin, and no one cared any longer about the stranger with the sword.

Those who drank there were working men, tied to the land and their crafts. They left by ones and twos, and soon only Loyt and Ruana remained, dicing in the corner by the fire. She had luck and the skill of years, and he was very good at cheating. Nevertheless, she had won much of his store of coin from him by the time he chose to speak.

She had known it would come to speaking, soon or late.

“In the hills, a day's ride from here—north, that would be—lies a village much troubled. By what, the villagers of Paloe cannot say, for they do not know. But it screams in the night like a woman in childbed, so they say. And the women there weep for lost children. That they know.”

Ruana smiled grimly and drank from her wooden mug. “An' tha knew me to tell me this, why did tha not name me to them? Yon bowl mought have held silver as well as copper.”

Loyt smiled, and his white teeth flashed. “They would not thank me to bring them a legend in the flesh, Twiceborn.”

He did not ask to see the sword she carried, then or later.

Once upon a time there was a boy called Moonflute. As in Starharp and Moonflute; two great gaudy nonexistent legends that you could throw away your whole life over and at the end of it not know whether you'd gotten anything worth having, or, indeed, anything at all.

He was called Moonflute because he didn't have any other name at all; a child-of-the-mist, as the saying goes, left on the priest's doorstep nine months and a bit after some big feast-day, born to a woman who thought it better to leave town. The gold she left around his neck went for his keep, and the priest was careful to melt it down before he sold it. Some patrimonies aren't worth claiming.

The boy grew, and was apprenticed, and was called an airy handful of things until he was old enough to have opinions and ensure that one name stuck.

Moonflute. The Starharp's shadow, that would make the Starharp show itself so that it could be played; so that playing it would wake the Crownking, who would summon the quarreling gods to order and bring peace to the world. A suitable name for a big-eyed boy who looked too much like the lord of Corchado for anyone's peace and who believed, fiercely, in the singer's tales of nobility and grandeur chanted for a coin in the dooryard of the alehouse where he served.

He grew tall on his father's blood, lean on scraps, and fast on numerous would-be beatings. The likeness didn't disappear with age.

The year that he was twelve, a passing traveler, a bit too well-dressed to be where he was, asked his name. When told it, with defiance, the traveler did not laugh. He spoke, afterward and at length, to Moonflute's master, who spoke in turn to Moonflute. The innkeeper said nothing to the point, but gifted his startled scullion with a generous cut of the roasting mutton joint and a whole heel-end of new bread for his supper.

That night Moonflute broke his indentures. He was nobody's fool. He had no intention of ending his life as someone's gelded prettyboy, and if the stranger who had given him a whole silver coin for serving him had anything else in mind but that, it was probably worse. So he left. He'd meant to do it sooner or later. He wasn't going to be a pot-boy all his life. He was going to be a hero. Moonflute was going to find the Starharp, just like the legends said.

 

Heading south from Corchado he wandered for a trackless while, then found his luck in the defeat of a nest of bandits where all that was needed was recklessness, a torch, and a borrowed—he meant to return it, truly—horse. Moonflute continued south with a new sword and his own horse and the beginning of a name, drunk on possibilities. Perhaps his fortune lay in Alarra, in the army of the Emperor. But how much better to come to that a hero rich with deeds and exploits. He was young; the world was wide.

He gathered deeds as a miser gathers coins; each one never enough. Years passed without his notice, and each shift and diversion he was led to was only temporary—but he had years to squander. What he did in these scant few would—he thought—leave no mark upon his soul.

He was young, and hungry for more things than food. It was not adulation that he craved, though he did not know it yet. It was a sense of place. Fierce, impatient, idealistic; he held himself as the minimum acceptable standard for humanity and had no compassion for those who were less. And though he was not so very gifted, there were many who were less.

His father's father's father across a score of generations had burned as ardently—but the needs of each priest, beggar, soldier, and clerk in the Gray Duke's duchy had schooled him, if not to compassion, at least to kindness. But Moonflute had no ties to earth; the heavens drew him to fiery cometary progress.

When word came to him of the Monster of Paloe, it was plain to Moonflute he must attempt it. All the pat celebrations of the singer's tales vied for pride of place in Moonflute's imagination. A hero had a place in the world, and this triumph would surely be enough to make him one even in his own eyes. His mind veered among expectations that ranged from anticlimax to fable. Certified monsters were nearly as rare as real wizards; to ride into Alarra with its skin for a saddlecloth would be a splendid thing, and to ride into the village whose fields it terrorized with the great beast dead across his saddlebow would be ...

Almost enough. Almost.

So with some work he found the village and announced that he had come to end their trouble. The villagers were glad to see Moonflute, with his fine horse and his fine armor and all the gaudy trappings of heroism. The forester who had tried to trap the monster had been eaten, and the monster was not yet enough of an impediment to the collection of Alarra's taxes to warrant the sending of kingsmen. The headman was lavish in his relief, and promised the wanderer liberal reward for fear he should change his mind and leave instead. They feted him richly, and at dawn they sent him forth to the hunt.

His horse was silky black and grain-fed; skittish and neat-footed, with a mane as fine as a woman's hair; splendid and suitable for the hero he would someday be. He had won it at dice.

It died a little after mid-morning.

The forester had died in these hills; the monster's lair must be nearby. As he rode, a shadow blotted out the sun.

Before he could remark on it, before he could look, the creature he had sought landed slipshod on his horse's neck. He had one glimpse of a flat spade-shaped head and eyes that glowed pale silver before he was flung, savaged and dripping, from his frenzied beast. That was not the worst.

Nor was lying at the bottom of the ravine, looking up at his legs as the blood trickled along them and hearing the splintering of bone that followed the horse's dying screams.

No, the worst was knowing that sword and dagger had been lost in the brushwood tangle of his descent, and that at least one leg was useless, vised between the interlocking branches that pinned him. He was trapped, and the monster would come back. He had seen its eyes. It would come back for him. And he might not be dead by then.

He'd been a fool, and he was paying for that luxury now in the only coin that closes such debts.

 

Ruana Rulane rode through the autumn fields, and on into the woods that framed the deep forest. There would be no heat in the autumn sunlight until the late afternoon; Ruana was glad of her heavy cloak and the warmth of the horse between her knees.

She loosened Shadowkiss in its well-greased sheath, and told over the ashwood shafts of the hunting spears she'd bought from the forester's widow, and wondered what prey she sought.

A monster, the villagers said. That could be anything. But wolves wouldn't take children when sheep could be had. And Worm would blight the land and leave the children and the folk to starve. The forester had spoken to his wife of a cat before he was killed himself, but the tracks were weeks gone and the cats in these woods hunted rabbits, not men.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, a memory stirred.

She came finally into the rocks and the open land, and her horse and the carrion feeders shied at the same moment. She saw the half-eaten horse, still in its gaudy trappings. Its neck had been bitten through, and there were deep claw-marks upon its shoulders and its flanks. The memory came clear, and she remembered.