The eyes flickered to Sun Wolf speculatively, then back to Sheera again. “You were wise not to wed my son,” the lady said, putting back the oilskin hood to reveal a tight-coiled braid of white hair pinned close about her head. “He has no more courage than a cur dog that suffers itself to be put out into the rain and fed only the guts of its kills. He is like his father, who also feared Altiokis. Have you met Altiokis?”
Sheera looked startled at the question, as if meeting the Wizard King were tantamount to meeting one’s remoter ancestors, Sun Wolf thought—or meeting the Mother or the Triple God in person.
The lady’s thin lip curled. “He is vulgar.” she pronounced.
“How such a creature could have lived these many years...” Under their creased lids, her eyes flickered, studying Sheera, and her square-cut lips settled into their fanning wrinkles with a look of determination. Sun Wolf was uncomfortably reminded of an old aunt of his who had kept all of his family and most of the tribe in terror for years.
“Come with me to the top of the hill, child,” she said at last. The two women moved off through the wet, winter-faded grass; then Lady Wrinshardin paused and glanced back, as if as an afterthought, at the Wolf. “You come, too.”
He hesitated, then obeyed her—as everyone else must also obey her—following them up the steep slope where granite outcrops thrust through the shallow soil, as if the body of the earth were impatient with that thin and unproductive garment. Greenish-brown hills circled them under the blowing dun rags of the hoary sky.
“My great-grandfather swore allegiance to the Thane of Grimscarp a hundred and fifty years ago,” Lady Wrinshardin said after they had climbed in silence for a few moments, with the tor still rising above their heads, vast as an ocean swell. “Few remember him or the empire that he set out to build, he and his son. In those days, many rulers had court wizards. The greater kings, the lords of the Middle Kingdoms in the southwest, could afford the best. But those who served the Thanes were either the young, unfledged ones, out to make their reputations, or the ones who hadn’t the ability to be or do anything more. They were all of a piece, pretty much—my great-grandfather had one, the Thanes of Schlaeg had one...and the Thanes of Grimscarp, the most powerful of the Tchard Mountain Thanes, had one.
“His name was Altiokis.
“This much I had from my grandfather, who was a boy when the Thane of Grimscarp started setting up an alliance of all the Thanes of all the great old clans, the ancient warrior clans here, in the Tchard Mountains, and down along the Bight Coast, where they hadn’t been pushed out by a bunch of jumped-up tradesmen and weavers who lived behind city wails and never put their noses out of doors to tell which way the wind was blowing. This was in the days before the nuuwa began to multiply until they roamed the mountains and these hills like foul wolves, the days before those human-dog-things, those abominations they call ugies, had ever been heard of. The old Thane of Grim wanted to get up a coalition of the Thanes and the merchant cities and he was succeeding quite nicely, they say.
“But something happened to him. Grandfather couldn’t remember clearly whether it was sudden or gradual; he said the old Thane’s grip seemed to slip. A week, two weeks, then he was dead. His son, a boy of eighteen, ruled the new coalition, with Altiokis at his side.—None of us was ever quite sure when the boy dropped out of sight.”
The steepness of the hill had slowed their steps, the old woman and the young one leaning into the slope. Glancing back, the Wolf could see the other women moving about down below, their flesh bright against the smoky colors of the ground. Tisa and her aunt, Gilden’s sister, the big, bovine Eo, were holding the horse still and stroking its soft nose; Drypettis, as usual, was sitting apart from the others, talking to herself; her eyes were jealously following Sheera.
The freshening wind cracked in Lady Wrinshardin’s cloak like an unfurling sail. The wry old voice went on. “Altiokis’ first conquest was Kilpithie—a fair-sized city on the other side of the mountains; they wove quite good woolen cloth there. He used its inhabitants as slaves to build his new Citadel at the top of the Grim Scarp, where he’d raised that stone hut of his in a single night. They said that he used to go up there to meditate. From there he raised his armies and founded his empire.”
“With the armies of the clans?” Sheera asked quietly.
They had paused for breath, but the climb had warmed her again, and she stood without shivering, the wind that combed the hillcrests tangling her black hair across her face.
“At first,” the lady said grimly. “Once he began to mine gold from the Scarp and from the mountains all about it, he could afford to hire mercenaries. They always said there was another evil that marched in his armies, too—but maybe it was only the sort of men he hired. He pollutes all he touches. Strange beasts multiply in his realm. You know ugies? Ape-things—the Tchard Mountains are stiff with them, though they were never seen before. Nuuwa—”
“Altiokis surely didn’t invent nuuwa,” Sun Wolf put in. He shook his wet hair back, freeing it of the chain around his neck; he was aware of the old lady’s sharp eyes gauging him, judging the relationship between the chain and Sheera against the sureness and command in his voice. He went on. “You get nuuwa turning up in records of one place or another for as far back as the records go. They’re mentioned in some of the oldest songs of my tribe, ten, twelve, fifteen generations ago. Every now and again, you’ll just get them, blundering around the wilderness, killing and eating anything they see.”
The fine-chiseled nostrils flared a little, as if Lady Wrinshardin were unwilling to concede any evil for which Altiokis were not responsible. “They say that nuuwa march in his armies.”
“I’ve heard that,” the Wolf said. “But if you know anything about nuuwa, you’d know it’s impossible. For one thing, there just aren’t that many of them. They—they simply appear, but their appearances are few and far between.”
“Not so few these days,” she said stubbornly. She pulled her oilskin cloak more tightly about her narrow shoulders and continued up the hill,
“And anyway,” the Wolf argued as he and Sheera fell into step with her once more, “they’re too stupid to march anywhere. Hell, all they are is walking mouths...”
“But it cannot be denied,” the lady continued, “that Altiokis spreads evil to what he touches. The Thanes served him once out of regard for their vows to the Thane of Grim. Now they do so from fear of him and his armies.”
They stopped at the crest of the hill, while the winds stormed over and around them like the sea between narrow rocks. Below them on the other side, the Thanelands rolled on, silent and haunting in their winter drabness, possessed of a weird spare beauty of their own. The dead heather and grass of the hills of slate-gray granite gleamed silver with wetness. Twisted trees clung to the skyline like bent crones and shook flailing fists at the heavens.
Far off, in a cuplike depression between three hills, a single, half-ruined tower pointed like a broken bone end toward the windy void above.
“What you’re doing is foolish, you know,” the lady said.
Sheera’s nostrils flared, but she said nothing. Quite a tribute, the Wolf thought, to the old broad’s strength of character, if she can keep Sheera quiet.
“I suppose there’s some scheme afoot in the city to free Tarrin and the menfolk and retake Mandrigyn. As if, having beaten them once, Altiokis could not do so again.”
“He beat them because they were divided by factions,” Sheera said quietly. “I know. My husband was the first man in Derroug Dru’s party and had more to do than most with Altiokis’ victory. Many of the men who supported Altiokis cause—the poorer ones, whose favor he did not need to buy—were sent to the mines as well. And my girls, the whores who go up to the mines, tell me that there is another army of miners, from all corners of Altiokis’ realm, who would fight for the man who freed them.”