Sun Wolf 1 - The Ladies Of Mandrigyn by Barbara Hambly

here.
    He lay in the darkness on his narrow cot, listened to the high-pitched, muted babble in the room below, and thought about women.
    Women.
    
    
    
    
     Human beings who are not men.
    Who had said that to him once? Starhawk—last winter, or the winter before, when she was explaining something about that highly individual fighting style of hers . . . It was something he had not thought of at the time. Now it came back to him, with the memory of those gray, enigmatic eyes.
    Human beings who are not men.
    Even as a child, he had understood that the demons that haunted the empty marshlands around his village were entities like himself, intelligent after their fashion, but not human. Push them, and they did not react like men.
    He had met men who feared women and he understood that fear. Not a physical fear—indeed, it was this type of man who was often guilty of the worst excesses during the sacking of a city. This fear was something deeper. And yet the other side of that coin was the yearning to touch, to possess, the desire for the soft and alien flesh.
    There was no logic to it. But training this troop wasn’t going to be like training a troop of inexperienced boys, or of men, none of whom weighed over a hundred and thirty pounds.
    The day’s rain had broken after sundown. A watery gleam of moonlight painted the slanted wall above his head. With the cold wind, voices from the garden blew in—Sheera’s, speaking to those wealthier women who had come, as if to a party, in their gondolas to the front door of her great, marble-faced townhouse. Women’s voices, like music in the wet night.
    Was it training,
    
     he wondered, that made women distrustful of one another? The fact that so much was denied them?
     Maybe, especially in a city like Mandrigyn, where the women were close-kept and forbidden to do those things that would free them from the tutelage of men. He’d seen that before—the hothouse atmosphere of gossip and petty jealousies, of wrongs remembered down through the years and unearthed, fresh and stinking, on the occasions of quarrels. Would women be different if they were brought up differently?
    Would men?
    His father’s bitter, mocking laughter echoed briefly through his mind.
    Then he became aware that someone was standing by the foot of his bed.
    He had not seen her arrive, nor heard the petal-fall of her feet on the floorboards. Only now he saw her face, floating like a misshapen skull above the dark blob of the birthmark, framed in the silver-shot masses of her hair. He was aware that she had been standing there for some time.
    “What the . . . ” he began, rising, and she held up her hand.
    “I have only come to lay on you the bounding-spells to hold the poison in your veins harmless, so long as you remain in Mandrigyn,” she said. “As I am not a true wizard, not come to the fullness of my power, I cannot work spells at a distance by the mind alone.” Like a skeleton hand, her white fingers moved in the air, and she added, “It is done.”
    “You did it all right on the ship,” he grumbled sullenly.
    One end of that black line of eyebrow moved. “You think so? It is one of the earliest things wizards know—how to come and go unnoticed, even by someone who might be looking straight at them.” She gathered her cloak about her, a rustling in the darkness, preparing to go. “They are downstairs now. Will you join them?”
    “Why should I?” he asked, settling his shoulders back against the wall at the bed’s head. “I’m only the hired help.”
    The rosewood voice was expressionless. “Perhaps to see what you will have to contend with? Or to let them see it?”
    After a moment, he got to his feet, the movement of his shoulders easing a little the unaccustomed pressure of the chain. As he came closer to her, he saw how ravaged Yirth’s face was by exhaustion. The black smudges beneath her eyes, the harsh lines of strain, did nothing for her looks. The last days of the voyage