Captivity (24 page)

The pieces were formed of stout planks lashed
together crosswise in a double thickness. The men in the front of
the column carried their wooden pieces in front like shields that
covered them from the top of their heads to the ground. The men at
the sides held pieces on each exposed flank, and men in the middle
raised their pieces over the heads of all like a roof. The strange
little column, completely encased in thick wood, trudged slowly
forward like a turtle inside its heavy shell. The arrows, expertly
aimed, embedded themselves harmlessly in the planking. The column
continued to advance as it absorbed a second and third volley.

A famous Terran army, conquerors of a vast
empire millennia ago, its foot soldiers, like ours, armed only with
swords and knives, had used just such a device to overcome enemies
armed with arrows. They too had seen its resemblance to a turtle’s
shell. Only Dominic, who, like me, reads history, could have
thought of such a thing. He had understood me last night and, as I
had hoped, had found a way for his men to do more than simply
retreat in the face of superior and illegal weapons.

When the column was bristling from so many
arrows that it resembled a porcupine, a muffled order sounded from
inside and the men backed up until they were out of range. Making
sure they were in plain sight the whole time, and with many obscene
words and appropriate gestures, they withdrew all the arrows from
the wooden shields, broke each shaft and tossed the pieces aside.
After a brief rest, they lifted their shields, reformed the column,
and marched again toward the castle wall.

Reynaldo swore and raged. Jana, breathless
and watchful the first time, laughed as the same scene was
reenacted once and then again. “Niall heard me,” she said. “He
heard me. You’re all going to be killed.”

Reynaldo was tempted to smack her gloating
smug face, but he was too busy and worried, and he knew she was
wrong. Niall and the Aranyi forces had made their shields before
the attack. That’s what all the ax-blows had been about. Jana’s
shouts were irrelevant. The Aranyi men had already known about the
arrows. Reynaldo was sure Niall had not learned anything last night
from Jana. It must be what the ‘Gravina witch had said before she
died. There was nothing Reynaldo could do about it now.

The bandits had become nervous and
undisciplined. The little wooden turtle was coming closer to the
wall on each foray. The bandits were shooting arrow after arrow,
trying to aim at the cracks, the spaces where the pieces of wood
met unevenly. Surely some arrows would find an opening and at least
wound someone, forcing a man to drop his shield and expose himself
and his fellows. So far they had been unsuccessful. One Aranyi man
appeared to have sustained an injury to his exposed foot, another
to his arm. Both had merely withdrawn to the rear while others
moved forward to take their places, and the column had
reformed.

Reynaldo’s men could see the inevitable
coming. They didn’t need
crypta
to guess how things would
end. The Aranyi forces would keep up the slow dance. The bandits
would run out of arrows. They had made a large number, to be on the
safe side, but the Aranyi forces could continue the teasing forward
and backward motion until all the arrows were gone. Then it would
become a conventional siege and storm. With such a ruin to defend,
the outcome was a foregone conclusion.

“Save your arrows for the defense,” Reynaldo
said. The men had already made the same decision. They gave up the
offensive and watched as the little armored column crept heavily up
to the inner walls and stood in front of the weather-beaten wooden
door barred from inside and hung on rusting iron hinges.

The Aranyi men waited a few minutes,
apparently watching for more arrows and getting their breath. Then
the siege began. A small battering ram, towed at the end of the
column, was passed up front, and its pounding echoed loud in the
still air of a warm summer day. Everyone could almost feel the
quivering of the door’s ancient timbers, the shaking of the
castle’s crumbling foundation. It would not be long.

The bandits tried one last time to shoot at
the column while the batterers worked. Perhaps they would have to
uncover themselves in the press near the door. But it is hard to
shoot accurately while aiming straight down, and the parts of the
castle wall that were still accessible to the bandits were all in a
broad continuous front. The jutting towers, essential design
features of any respectable castle, which form corners and provide
perfect defensive angles for shooting at batterers and climbers,
had collapsed long ago, the wood of the floors and roofs decayed.
Once again the precious arrows lodged in hard thick wood and the
ram continued its work uninterrupted.

Reynaldo cursed and shook himself awake from
his staring indecision. “Abandon the roof,” he said. “Wait for them
inside the door.”

Dragging Jana along on the leash, Reynaldo
herded his men off the ramparts and down to the entrance, where he
ordered them into a rough welcoming committee. The best archers
formed the front ranks; the rest, armed with their traditional
swords and knives, stood behind, ready for the hand-to-hand combat
that was most familiar.

My attention was called back to my own
immobile body. I had not been able to estimate the duration of my
“death” very precisely; I had simply lowered myself into oblivion
as quickly and thoroughly as I could safely manage. Now, noise and
the telepath’s infallible sense of the presence of others were
producing the first stirrings of returning consciousness. The
strange taps and thuds that had worried Reynaldo earlier had grown
much louder. They came from somewhere nearby, the cellar, perhaps,
or the dungeon, directly below my storeroom cell. But through that
noise I distinguished another: the familiar sound of a woman’s bare
feet on the stairs. It seems I, too, was about to receive
visitors.

Michaela slipped quietly through the open
door and squatted beside me. Her rage penetrated my reviving spirit
like arrows shot at close range.
You’ll pay for this
, she
thought at me, speaking to me in her mind as if she knew I wasn’t
dead, as if she knew I could hear her.
You ‘Graven think you’ll
always win, even in death. But you’ll pay, you soft pretty little
cunt who never did any work harder than embroidery or went hungry
longer than an hour. Couldn’t survive a day in my place without
your lord to protect you.
It had all become my fault, that
Reynaldo had raped her daughter, that I had exposed her to typhus,
that the whole band was about to face an angry avenging ‘Graven
army. Michaela was going to do something to redress the
imbalance.

She lifted my left wrist, examining the steel
bracelet, the gleaming band of smooth metal that, as I had shown
her, could not be unlocked or removed. Convinced now that this was
so, Michaela drew her knife, a woman’s tool for gathering and
trimming firewood and boning meat, and searched for the best place
to saw through the wrist bone. Before things became chaotic
upstairs, she would make sure not to let this one valuable object
slip through her fingers. The thin, worn blade cut a first
experimental line in my skin.

I was not yet alive enough to feel pain or
true anxiety. There had been no time last night to make more
careful plans, to weave a force field of
crypta
protection
around me, or guard against weapons that might test my death more
thoroughly than Reynaldo’s kicks. I had not had energy to spare.
Dimly I wondered if
crypta
healing could regenerate
something as complicated as a hand.

But the next deep, carving stroke never came.
Michaela stopped, transfixed, as the strange sounds overwhelmed her
senses—a hammering of metal tools on stone and earth, reverberating
in the close room with a tactile dimension that was more than mere
noise, as if the walls and floor were vibrating. A clinking,
clanging scraping and shoveling, making rapid progress toward where
I lay and Michaela crouched, very still now, her knife forgotten in
her hand, her eyes no longer on the bracelet but on the small
protrusion growing in the dirt floor.

It didn’t matter to me. I knew I must be in
some weird hallucinatory state, stranger than the dream cycle of
normal sleep, enjoying a foretaste of death’s detachment. So when
the protrusion became the blade of an entrenching tool, like a
combination of shovel and dagger, and then withdrew to reemerge as
a head, I was calm as only the comatose can be. I watched, through
Michaela’s staring eyes, although without her paralyzing fear, as
the head and shoulders of a man poked up out of the hole he had
made.

The mutual startle as the man and the woman
locked eyes went through me like a sharp knife through flesh. The
man had not expected to see Michaela any more than she had
anticipated intruders from underground. Michaela blinked several
times, groaned with terror, but decided on action. While the man
was still just a head and torso sprouting from the floor, she
scuttled over and stabbed at his face.

She had waited just a heartbeat too long. The
man had worked both hands loose, and he was armed with a short,
triangular-bladed sword as well as his digging tool. He knocked
Michaela’s darting hand away in an easy sweeping movement that
disguised the strength behind it. Her knife flew out of her grip,
traveling in a wide, lazy arc. Before she could flee, he grabbed
her by the hair, pulled her backward and cut her throat so deeply
she barely gurgled as her life bled away in seconds. The blood
sprayed around the room and ran down the walls.

Only now did the rest of the man’s body
wriggle free and the entire person appear. A small man, short but
barrel-chested, with the huge muscled forearms of a blacksmith. The
round little man sighed with the release of tension, wiped his
bloody sword on the dead woman’s skirts, and retrieved his
shovel-dagger from the floor where he had dropped it. Something
caught his eye. He turned the almost severed head face down,
exposing the glass comb to full view. He untangled it from the dead
woman’s matted hair, working slowly and patiently, shook off a few
clinging strands, polished away a drop of blood with a broad thumb,
and stood looking down at me and Val.

I was in his mind now, had jumped quickly
from the dying Michaela, my eyes still shut, my heartbeat and
breathing still undetectable. “Margrave Aranyi!” the man called
down the hole, speaking in an unusual dialect. “Your lady it is
found I have. But too late it is afraid I am.” The little man was
not afraid for himself, only sorry that he had not been able to do
better for Dominic. And now, to my astonishment, the familiar
distinctive features of my husband appeared from the hole in the
ground. He was bareheaded, his coarse dark hair gray with dust from
his subterranean journey, his face blackened, partly for camouflage
and partly by the soot of the tunnels he had traveled.

Dominic hoisted himself out and stood over me
and Val. The little man offered Dominic the comb and he accepted it
wordlessly, with only a bowing of his head, before falling to his
knees. He scooped my shoulders up in one strong arm and cradled my
head to place the comb in my lank hair. Clutching me to his chest,
Dominic rocked me back and forth, keening softly under his breath.
The sound grew to become a moan, then a cry. Finally the cries
broke free into the most glorious and heartrending noise I have
ever heard in my life.

My husband, for the first and only time, sang
to me. He sang a lament, a dirge, the mourning of a lover for his
lost beloved. It was not in Eclipsian, certainly not in Terran, nor
in the convoluted speech of the little man who had found me. But I
knew it for what it was, as a telepath can understand clear
thoughts in any language.
Beloved of my heart, reflection of my
soul, without you I am but half myself
. The thoughts formed in
my head as Dominic chanted the words in a music that was like a
clear stream flowing over smooth stones.

My husband’s deep voice resonated with the
strange song and, as my consciousness slowly reformed, I felt the
fluttering in my stomach that accompanies any experience of aching,
emotional beauty. My hair seemed to rise from my scalp with the
unearthly wonder of the sound. My heart was inspired to beat faster
and my breathing sped up to accommodate the greater flow of blood.
Dominic’s song brought me back from death, accelerating the
process, so that what should have taken hours was accomplished too
quickly, in minutes.

Once Dominic felt my active presence he
stopped his singing abruptly. If I was awake to hear it, I could no
longer be privileged to enjoy the forbidden pleasure.

Back in my own mind again, I thought to
Dominic.
Don’t mourn me yet, my love
, I said.
You see I
am not gone, but only in the crypta-death
. I spent my entire
new store of strength in one mighty effort and lifted a hand, my
left, the tiny gas jet of my inner flame wavering out its last
flickers of electricity, the red line where Michaela had cut me
dripping the first beads of the blood that was just beginning to
flow. I rubbed my husband’s smudged cheek with my knuckles.

Dominic moved his head an inch to kiss the
back of my hand. “Yes, Amalie, my dearest, my lady wife,” he said,
his voice still musical with grief, “I know. But—oh, gods—to see
you like this—”

I touched his lips again, silencing the rest
of the thought. “I understand,” I whispered in speech, loosening my
jaws from the rictus of imitation death. He had seen the inevitable
future, half a century from now, the old woman who would almost
certainly predecease such a vigorous and strong husband, and he had
mourned that wife of fifty years of marriage, as he might not have
the strength or the will to do then.