Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [74]
Molin’s schemes would never succeed if he relied on the chief’s second wife to present his arguments. An outsider with young sons, Nadalya stood on shaky ground with her husband’s people and—remarkably—she knew the limits of her influence. She was shrewd enough to stay out of Molin’s way; wise enough to send him messages that warned him of tribal rivalries before he inflamed them.
Nadalya’s messenger was her son’s nursemaid, who showed up in Molin’s appointed tent every night. She was a comely enough woman—if you liked your women stout and strong enough to carry a horse on her own back. Molin preferred his women lean—not that it would have mattered. He was in his seventies, decades too old for passionate affairs or wintering in a tent with only a few furs for warmth and a layer of autumn grass for a mattress. Night after night, Terzi knelt over him, kneading the aches from his old muscles, imparting her mistress’s wisdom.
Molin won the Irrune one by one, like a man spinning fleece into yarn. Arizak’s first wife, the redoubtable Verrezza, was the hardest. She distrusted him and hated Nadalya not because she was younger or more beautiful—though Nadalya was both of those things—but because Nadalya was change incarnate for Irrune traditions and Verrezza, a handful of years older than her husband, remembered the colors, sounds, and smells of the Irrune homeland. She’d suffered too many changes since her girlhood to embrace any more.
“Think on this, dear lady,” Molin suggested to Verrezza in her own language. He’d learned more of the language in three months than Nadalya had learned in ten years. “Sanctuary is small and gods-forsaken, but it is Rankan. There is a bathing pool within the palace—”
“Feh! Such things do not impress me.”
Molin ignored the interruption—“Where the water runs cool in summer and hot in winter; there are three of them, in fact. One of them is lined with black marble and ringed with alabaster statues of naked women cavorting with unicorns.”
The redoubtable’s eyebrows formed a disapproving angle. Her chin receded into the soft flesh of her neck.
“Think on this as she will think on it. Do you think that she will choose to live in a tent when she can live in such a palace? Do you think that she will expose those boys of hers to the sun when she can surround them with thick walls and whisper-soft silk?”
Verrezza at last cracked a smile. “My husband is Irrune. He could not bear to live between walls that cannot be moved. He will leave her there and her sons with her. His heart will be mended toward me and mine.”
Once Molin had the voice of tradition on his side, the remaining holdouts and doubters fell quickly in line. After that he had until the snows melted and the ground hardened to mold a passel of raiders into a force that would follow him through the distractions of Sanctuary’s streets to the palace, where the fighting would be done afoot, not astride, against fanatics who worshiped destruction.
Two hundred men and twice as many horses thundered away from the Spine. From a distance, they could pass for Rankan cavalry. Closer, they were raw and rowdy. The oaths Molin had collected from the lot of them wouldn’t have held through the first night, but Arizak per-Mizhur was a rarity among barbarians—a leader who could see beyond tomorrow. He craved vengeance for his brother’s death, and he’d been sincerely appalled by Molin’s tales of Sanctuary’s recent, desperate history; but mostly Arizak had grasped the advantages of separating his wives before Molin explained them.
With Arizak firmly in command of his clans, the journey south was as smooth and swift as the White Foal River flowing beside them.
The Sanctuary