He looked ill; he was still shaking off the effects of the nataquat which had been used to drug him. But his voice, when he shouted, could be heard by everyone.
'There!' shouted Haveros, pointing at the looming mass of Castle Vaunting. 'That's the enemy. Armed men. Hundreds of them. But that's not all. Wizards. Three wizards have come from the south.
'So look at our heroes! Fighting in the mud! While up there – power is gathering. Every hour we delay gives those forces more time to gather their strength. I've been there. I've seen them. I can name the wizards for you: Phyphor, Garash, Miphon.
'You think I came here from choice? To Argan, from choice? I could have fled to Ashmolea. Or to the Ravlish Lands. A hundred kingdoms would have hired my sword. But I came here. Because the Lord Khmar gave me my orders. Because he knows – and you know, if you think about it. There's powers here which might be enough to finish us.
'That's why I came. Risked my life. Across the Pale, through the forest. Months here. Learning the castle, learning the ways. And now I'm here to tell your danger. And what do I find? Mud fighting! Over a woman. An army – fighting over this. Over this?’
Haveros took hold of Yen Olass. She was wet, soggy, muddy, her hair bedraggled. Her furs, covered with mud,
emphasized the unyielding broad-shouldered bulk of her heavy-boned body, so typical of women of Skanagool race.
'What are you going to fight over next?' said Haveros. 'The local washerwoman? A sack of stinking fish?’
There was laughter. Haveros gave Yen Olass a little shake. She let herself be shaken, suspecting that he might be saving her life – but she hated him all the same. She wished she could have been beautiful. And she wished she could have annihilated Haveros with a glance. And she wished she had taken her chance to kill Chonjara, who was now dragging himself up from the mud, slowly, painfully.
'The girl stays with me,' said Haveros. 'We can't have her running round on the loose, punching out our commanders. As for anything else… that can wait till we've taken the castle. We've got work to do.’
A siege marshal took the hint and lifted his voice in command. Slowly, the crowd began to disperse. Nan Nulador helped Chonjara away, and Lord Alagrace, his own authority at least partially restored, began to issue orders.
The army was functioning again; trampling horses, bootshod men, oxen, cartwheels and falling rain completed the transformation of the occupied ground into a quagmire. Preparations for a rapid attack got underway. The leadership crisis was temporarily resolved, and everyone was back at work.
And Yen Olass understood that Haveros had intervened precisely to obtain this result. It hardly mattered to him whether she lived or died, but he refused to allow the army to amuse itself at the expense of the business of war. In all the army, nobody cared about the ultimate fate of Yen Olass Ampadara: except perhaps Karahaj Nan Nulador.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The army was camped on open ground between the Hollern River and Castle Vaunting. This must have been a reasonably pleasant spot when the advance guard had arrived. Now that some five thousand men had trampled over it, dug holes and fireplaces, put up earthwork defences, unloaded carts and driven in hitching posts for oxen and horses, it looked ugly. The town of Lorford, just to the west, was now mostly burnt-out ruins; what remained was being demolished for firewood. Soldiers had already crossed the bridge leading north from Lorford to fell trees for extra firewood.
What would happen once Estar had been conquered and subdued? Yen Olass knew engineers and surveyors attached to the army were investigating the possibility of digging a canal from the Pale to the Central Ocean – a canal right through Trest and Estar, so ships could journey from Tameran to the Central Ocean without daring the notoriously dangerous waters of the Penvash Channel. No doubt Estar would become a garrison town writ large, a chunk of territory consecrated to military use.
Yen Olass pitied the people who lived in Estar: but only a little. After all, they would be better off than the inhabitants of Monogail. The Yarglat had thought their land worthless, not worth a garrison, and Monogail had been depopulated. Which was why, whatever Yen Olass dreamed of, she never dreamed of going home: she had no home left to go to.
But she could not forget the cold northern wastelands of her childhood, and she could not help thinking how things would have been if the invaders had never come. Her people would have admired her black hair, her grey eyes,
her strong shoulders and her eloquent speech. They would have thought her an ideal woman, perceptive, intelligent, strong enough to master animals to her will, and properly padded against the winter cold.
She would have been reindeer woman by now, or maybe a mind-healer like her mother. In any case, she would have had her own grenderstrander and her own grey hunter. No cats, of course, not in Monogail (no cats, no trees, no apples, no snakes)… but she might have had a man. Or she might not – it would have been for her to choose.
Above all else, she resented the loss of the right to choose. As an oracle, she had been a pivot, a device to insert into a deadlocked conflict to allow opposing forces the chance to move toward a mutually acceptable compromise. The Rule of the Sisterhood, though it had forbidden her many things, had protected her with a certain aura of holy mystery.
Now, it seemed her career as an oracle was over. The word had been spoken: 'dralkosh'. Just by saying that word, Chonjara had marked her. He had branded her. Haveros had saved her life, at least for the moment, but Yen Olass knew she would be risking her own destruction if she ever spoke again in public.
So what was she now? A slave, no more. If she managed to cling to Haveros, she might keep her life a little longer. If he died or gave her away or sent her away, then the best she could hope for was that someone would find her a useful object, to fetch and carry, to honour and obey, to worship and respect, to be mounted and fucked on demand, to bear children as her owner wished, or to be probed and aborted as he wished.
And if she stayed with Haveros, could she hope for anything better?
And even if the world forgot that she had been called a dralkosh, and even if (by a miracle) Haveros persuaded the Sisterhood and the Ondrask to renounce their claims to her life and her body – would she be free? She would be free to beg, or starve, or live in rags and work as a washerwoman, or give herself to one man or many as a wife or a whore, meaning a slave for life or a day.
In the Collosnon Empire, women did not have their own choices or their own voices. The men were trained from their earliest days to be conquerors; they practised their skills on women at home, then went off to foreign wars to use their skills against outsiders, returning to their women with those skills now perfected and in need of constant practice to keep them so.
Yen Olass knew her wit was a match for most men, and her strength a match for many. But she could not take on a whole society organized for conquest at home and abroad. She had won her fight with General Chonjara, but if Haveros had not stepped forward to end the matter, she might have lost. She might have mastered the crisis with her eloquence, if nobody opposed her. But a single shout – 'Three cheers for the dralkosh', say – would have been enough to have her torn to pieces.
No matter how strong she was, and no matter how intelligent, she was weak because convention was against her. She was a woman, hence, by definition, an object to be used in all those interesting ways men had invented.
In the Collosnon Empire, a man was a fish swimming down a great river, able to tap vast energies by a little intelligent navigation. Yen Olass, on the other hand, was a strange fish from a foreign sea, sheltering in the lee of a rock as she wondered if she could live long enough to force her way a little further upstream. Despite her intelligence and strength, she could not hope to outlast the river.
When Yen Olass dared to visit the translation section, it was made clear to her that her services were no longer wanted. She had expected this. Wiping someone else's spittle off her face, she grabbed her pack and fled.
