He shook his head again. And they expected to be able to storm the mines! He only hoped to be far along the road to Wrynde when they tried it.
He went back along the line, patiently correcting strokes.
Many of them shied from his touch, having been trained to walk veiled and downcast in the presence of men. The tall woman who had challenged him was red-faced and missish; Gilden Shorad, coldly businesslike; Wilarne M’Tree, grave and trusting. Drypettis jerked violently from his correcting hand, and for a moment he saw in her eyes not only a jealous hatred but terror as well. A virgin, he thought. It figures. And likely to remain that way, for all her prettiness.
Gently, he held out his hand for the sword and demonstrated the proper way to use it. Those huge, pansy-brown eyes followed the movements of his hand devouringly, without once straying to either his body or his face. Her cheeks were scarlet, as if scalded.
For all that she was a tough little piece, and grittily determined to do well, she was another one, Sun Wolf thought, whom he’d have to watch.
It was only at Sheera’s insistence that she had been included in the troop at all.
The first muster of women had yielded over a hundred, of whom he had cut almost half on the spot. Some of them had been dismissed purely for physical reasons—fatness, or that telltale pallor of internal pain that marked old childbirth injuries. Many of them he’d cut because of the obvious signs of drunkenness or drug addiction. Four girls he had rejected simply because they were thirteen years old, though they had sworn, with tears, that they were fifteen and their mothers knew where they were. Three women he had dismissed, as tactfully as he could, because his instincts and a very short observation told him that they were quarrelsome, people who fomented discord either for their own amusement or simply unconsciously, as if they could not help it. The female version of this was less physical than that of the male, but the result was the same. In a secret command, troublemakers were not to be tolerated.
The women who were left were mostly young, the wives of craftsmen and laborers, though there was a fair sprinkling of merchants’ wives of varying degrees of wealth. About a dozen were whores, though privately. Sun Wolf did not expect most of them to stay the course. Enormous experience in the field had taught him that most women who sold themselves for a living lacked either discipline or the strength to control their lives—and he suspected this to be true even of those whom he had not rejected out of hand for drinking or drugs. One of the women in the final group that remained was a nun, an elderly woman who’d been the Convent baker for twenty years and had a grip like a blacksmith’s. He thought of Starhawk and smiled.
Those who were left he had divided into four groups, with instructions to report on alternate nights, either a few hours after sunset or at midnight. With luck, this arrangement would keep Sheera’s townhouse and grounds from being obviously the center of activity, for there were three or four ways into the compound, and others were being devised. Yirth had sworn a death curse upon betrayal from within, and the women had sworn fellowship with one another and loyalty to Sheera.
They were as safe as they could be, given the appalling circumstances, but Sun Wolf looked down the line of those white, sweating, sluglike bodies with no particularly sanguine hopes of success.
The women slipped quietly away from the bathhouse at the bottom of the grounds nearly two hours later, gowned once more as the respectable matrons or maidens they had been before they took up the study of arms. From the dark door of the orangery, Sun Wolf watched them, brief shadows against the dull, reddish glow from the pavilion’s windows, seeking passages, posterns, plank bridges over the canals, and the narrow back streets that would lead them to gondolas tied up in secluded courtyard lagoons. Light rainfall pattered on the bare, gray stems of the deserted garden. Beyond the walls, the lapping of the canals formed the murmurous background music to all life in that watery city.
The water clock in the dim room behind him told him that it would shortly be midnight. The women of the next group would appear soon.
The cold dampness bit into the bare flesh of his shoulders and legs, and he turned back into the silent wooden vaults of the orangery itself.
Sheera was there, wrapped in a shawl of flame-colored wool whose fringes brushed her bare feet. She was dressed for training in short drawers and leather guards, and her dark eyes were angry.
“Do you have to run them so hard?” she demanded shortly. “Some of them are so exhausted they can hardly stagger.”
“You want to ask ’em whether they’d rather be exhausted now or slaughtered to the last woman later on?”
Her face reddened. “Or are you trying to run them all out, in the hopes that I’ll give up my plans to free the men from the mines?”
“Women, I’ve learned by this time it’s no use hoping you’ll give up any plan that you’ve come up with, no matter how witless it is,” he snapped at her, walking over to the room’s single brazier of charcoal to rub his hands over the molten glow of the blaze. “If those women can’t take it, they’d better get out of the army. We don’t know what kind of resistance you’ll meet with up in the mines. Since you’ve made me the instructor, I’m damned well going to prepare those women for anything.”
“There’s no need to—” she began hotly.
“There is, unless they train more than a couple of hours every other night!” He swung back to face her, the reflection of the fire edging him in a line of gold. “And considering that you couldn’t come up with more than fourteen swords...”
“We’re doing what we can about that!” she retorted. “And about finding somewhere else to practice during the daytime. But the first thing Derroug Dru did when he came to power was collect every weapon in the city—”
“I told you that in the beginning.”
“Shut up! And he has spies everywhere within the walls.”
“Then meet outside the city.”
“Where?” she lashed out viciously.
With silky sweetness he replied, “That’s your affair, madam. I’m only your humble slave, remember? But I’m telling you that if those women don’t get more training than they’re getting, they’ll never be soldiers.”
“Do you sometimes wonder if Sheera is crazy?” he asked Amber Eyes, much later, as the pale glow of the sinking moon broke through the clouds to filter through the loft window and touch the fallow gold of her hair. It lay like a river of silk over his arm and chest, almost white against the brown of his skin.
She considered the matter for a moment, a grave look coming into those usually dreamy, golden eyes. Bedroom eyes, he called them, gentle and a little vulnerable, even when she was wielding a sword. At length she said, “No. At least, no crazier than the rest of us.”
He shifted his shoulders against the pillow. “That isn’t saying much.”
She turned her head, where it lay in the crook of his arm, and studied him for a moment, a tiny frown creasing her brow. The moonlight glimmered on the thread-fine chain of gold that encircled her throat, its shadow like a delicate pen stroke where it crossed the tiny points of her collarbone and vanished into the softer shadows of her hair.
The night of the first meeting in the orangery, when he had come up the stairs, she had been here, waiting, sitting on the edge of the narrow bed, clothed only in that heavy golden mane. Never one to question opportunity, Sun Wolf had taken her—that night and on the two nights since. He occasionally wondered why she had come to him, since she was obviously afraid of him; but aside from the love talk of her trade, she was a silent girl, enigmatic and evasive when he spoke to her.