The Rose of Sarifal (22 page)

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.

“Lady, you’re crying,” he said, which was not true. She reached up to touch the tears on his own cheek. How could anyone tell in this rainstorm? She knew because she could feel the shudder in his breath.

“It’s all right,” he said—how could it be all right? How could anything be all right? He bent to kiss her, and she turned her head to avoid him. But then she turned back, fiercely and furiously pressing her lips against his, and then opening her mouth so he could feel her teeth. He was the one who was here, and that was just as well. Better him than another. Look at the damage he had taken for her. Think of the damage he would take. Besides, he had played so sweetly in the afternoon, songs from her childhood in High Karador.

She felt his hands on her back. There came a shout from down below, and another shout. In time they turned away from each other and leaned over the parapet to watch Great Malar come down the causeway toward them, moving in the middle of a phalanx of enormous
wolves. He lumbered forward on squat, bandy legs, swinging his hunched body forward on his massive knuckles. But then they saw him rise up, straighten his back, raise his head, step forward almost like a man as his legs lengthened and reformed, his arms dwindled. Then he was down on all fours again, his long black tail lashing the air, his claws and teeth like sabers. Then his rough black pelt took on a scaly sheen, and he sank down lower, a black alligator wagging his enormous jaws. As he moved forward, his body transformed through a spectrum of predatory beasts, until he reached the gate itself and stood up on his hind legs.

“Lady, I must go,” said Lukas.

He ran his fingers through her hair. Then he lifted his sword off of the stones and ran down the spiral steps into the courtyard to take command of the gate. She watched him, and then looked past him to the broken cistern midway to the keep, the mouth of the tunnel to the sea. There was fighting there too, wolf-men who had climbed up from the water. Lycanthropes were inside the walls. So that was that. From down below she could hear the sound of the battering ram, a hollow pounding on the old, uncertain timbers.

The rain fell. Amaranth wiped the water from her eyes, then looked up at the sky. All of her women had run down to join the fight at the gate. She was alone on the battlements, so she was surprised to see movement along the wall to her left. A small figure walked along the outside edge of the parapet, balancing precariously over the abyss, her little arms spread wide. She raised her
head, and when she saw Amaranth she smiled, clapped her hands, and made a mincing, dancing series of steps until she stood above her, a little girl in a green dress, her long hair tangled, her lips cracked and chapped, and she was missing some teeth.

“Hey, you,” the little girl said. She was completely dry. Now she turned an ungainly pirouette and peered over the edge, where Malar and his beasts smashed at the gate. She wrinkled her snotty nose. “I don’t like him. I only had one priestess on this entire stupid island, and he killed her. The only one in generations, and he chopped her up into little pieces.” She turned back to look at Amaranth and closed one eye. “Shall I chase him away?”

“Please.”

“I don’t like him,” repeated the goddess. “He makes a big mess.” She squinted, then picked a ball of snot out of her nose, examined it briefly, and flicked it over the parapet. “You know,” she said, as if conversationally, “your walls are coming down.”

Amaranth said nothing.

“It is not my will,” continued the goddess, “that they should stand.”

There was screaming from the courtyard. The postern was broken open, and there were wolf-men in the courtyard. They had found the doors to the hall where the Northlander women had taken refuge. From where she stood, Amaranth could see neither the genasi nor Captain Lukas, though there was still resistance down below, she knew. There would always be resistance.

There was a hollow booming underneath her feet where the gate was giving way. The stones shuddered from the impact of the ram. But then Amaranth could feel a different kind of rhythm deeper and lower down, as if the crashing of the timbers formed the surface echo of something more profound, another gate deep under the earth.

“Look,” Chauntea said, and pointed her dirty little nail-chewed finger. To the east, beyond the beast-strewn meadow that led down to the shore, Amaranth could see a black line on the horizon under the milky dawn light, as if somehow she could see the bluffs of Oman Island fifty miles away across the strait, and they were moving toward her, a wall of water, she saw now. At the same time she could feel the cause of the great wave, a low trembling inside the earth, and as she watched, she saw the topmost tower of the wrecked keep, high on its stone pinnacle, crack and collapse.

“It’s time for you to go home,” suggested the goddess. “There’s no place for you here, you and the Northlanders. This is the land of the Black Blood.”

“I’ve tried to go home,” murmured Amaranth.

“Try again. East of Karador, by the water, there’s a sacred grove of trees where the women pray to the Earthmother. In the evenings they pray to me, hoping you come back. When the light of the setting sun touches the water, they catch it in their bowls and pour it out again. It’s a libation, silly! They have a good reason to pray. Your sister is a tyrant. Your nephew is a monster. That’s the sad truth.”

“I’ve wanted to. But I can’t find a way.”

“You’ll find it,” consoled the goddess. “Not land, not sea, not air. Find your boy and go. Follow the signs to the gateway in the Breasal Swamp. It will bring you home. Bring the boy with you. Tell you the truth,” she said, “and hope to die. He’s cute.”

“He’s not—”

But the little girl laughed and stuck her tongue out, as if to say, “I saw you.”

Amaranth turned back toward the sea. The battering ram had stopped its noise. Everything was quiet on the battlements, partly because she and the goddess stood as if in the silent epicenter of chaos, and partly because for a moment the lycanthropes had ceased their fighting, and all of them drew breath and looked around. The world itself was drawing breath. Amaranth watched the great wave suck the sea away from the beach, revealing weedy boulders and sunken wrecks—there had been a battle here in the old days, between the fleets of the Northlanders and the Ffolk.

Then the wave broke, and lost its height, and surged ashore over the low bluffs, across the meadows, over the causeway and beyond, until it flowed into the ditch itself, and broke against the walls of Caer Moray. When it pulled back, Amaranth could see Malar the Great in the shape of a black alligator, tumbling over the fields toward the shore.

“Goodbye,” Chauntea said. Turning on the parapet, stretching out her arms, she danced back the way she had come, sometimes hopping on one foot. Whether
it was from the force of her steps, or from the water churning underneath her, just behind her the wall cracked and slid down into the ditch—Amaranth wasn’t watching. The chaos closed around her now. She picked her sword up from her feet and ran down the steps into the courtyard where the fighting was over, the armies were dispersing, whatever remnants could pull themselves away.

C
APTAIN
R
URIK

K
ILL HIM
,” S
UKA SAID, SCRATCHING HER NOSE
.

They stood outside the prison in Caer Corwell. Poke had dragged the leShay prince over the cobblestones, away from the blank wall and down the street. Now they paused to draw breath and consider the next step, Marabaldia, the gnome, the cyclops, and the pig. It was early evening, and there was a mist over the port.

No one followed them. For a moment, Prince Araithe seemed almost human in his vulnerability, whimpering with shock, his velvet cap awry, his eyes closed, his gray hair stringy and unkempt, his shirtsleeve ripped and bloody. He lay on his back. Poke had him below his elbow. His gloves were gone. Marabaldia stood above him in her old blue dress, holding the iron bar she had taken from her cell. In this light her eyes shone in different colors.