The Rose of Sarifal (21 page)

In the afternoon the animals had rebelled against them, the simple beasts, maddened by instincts they didn’t understand, and the lycanthropes who hid among them, who had crept in through the palisades among the rats and dogs. They stole children from their cribs, and dragged women, screaming, from their household tasks. Chattering and cursing, the wolf-men lit fires and threw open the gates.

Toward evening the first refugees arrived beneath the walls of Caer Moray on the bay, and were welcomed inside. Lady Amaranth was sitting in an upstairs room with Captain Lukas. Gaspar-shen, feeling better, was taking a bath, his head and body entirely submerged in the iron bathtub, his slitted eyes staring up through the cold seawater as he lay blowing bubbles from the bottom. He’d been in there for hours.

Lukas was playing the violoncello, its long neck over his shoulder, its squat body between his knees. Lady Amaranth sat entranced. Many females of her closest court had come into the room and pressed against the
walls, as many as could fit, while even outside in the halls and corridors the lycanthropes huddled to listen. In the courtyards work had stopped.

During the course of renovations, the day before, a pig-woman had discovered an old storeroom, its door choked with fallen timbers. Left over from human times, unlooted by orcs, the room contained a number of old treasures, including some musical instruments wrapped in velvet, with waxed pouches for the strings.

Lukas had not had much opportunity to play in recent years. So for him the dances and sonatas that he managed to conjure from the delicate old spruce wood felt like an emanation from the past, a rediscovery of his childhood in the big house in Loudwater, where his father’s third wife had taught him music. Small things—the smell of the rosin, the squeak of his fingers on the strings—brought big memories, and in the middle of one sequence of arpeggios he caught a sudden glimpse of his stepmother as if she had been with him in the room, her bright eyes and pale lips outlined in kohl. She’d been scarcely older than himself, younger than he was now. And then other sensations also, the fragrance of her dark skin, the pressure of her hands as she corrected some mistake. Oh, he had studied diligently under her care and learned much skill. But his father had not forgiven him.

Who can step into a river twice? For the water is different and we ourselves are different. At these moments when we are borne into the past, our unhappiness can become a kind of pleasure. Music makes it so. Lukas
in a single trembling note recaptured an image of his stepmother as she paused at the threshold to rearrange the bodice of her dress, to compose herself before she reentered the public spaces of the house to reassume her duties there. She looked back at him, smiling crookedly as if she almost blamed him for taking something from her—no, his father had not forgiven him, and he had had to flee the house. No doubt his younger brother had inherited everything.

Lukas’s eyes were closed, and he told himself that he must open them or else risk embarrassment. When he did, he found himself in a room full of lycanthropes who, through their listening, had been transformed beyond the ordinary upper limit of their humanness. He found himself in the center of a circle of women whose faces and features were only slightly out of true, and whose rapt eyes followed every motion of his fingers. And Lady Amaranth was weeping, without any groaning or moaning or distortion of her beautiful features. But tears dropped from her lashes onto her cheeks. She, too, he guessed, had sunk back down into the past. To follow her he slipped into a minor key, one of the few gifts to humankind that the eladrin had brought up from the Feywild, and the foundation of all their music. He played her a love song from Karador, and wondered as he watched her face if this was the first music she had heard since she left home, and whether she recognized the tune, and what it meant to her. He wondered what she remembered of her first nine years, the richness of her life then, its poverty now. There being
no connection between morality and art, he imagined Lady Ordalf’s court was full of music.

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.