Shadowheart

by Tad Williams

  7

  The Battle of Kleaswell Market

  “One of the bandits’ women took pity on little Adis and gave him food from her own store. One day she and her man took the boy and escaped from the other bandits ...”

  —from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”

  AS THEY DREW CLOSER TO SOUTHMARCH, Briony’s heart grew heavier. It had been one thing to talk about recapturing the throne at the Tessian court, surrounded by idlers and courtiers, many of whom sympathized with her (or pretended to), but quite another to contemplate real action. However willing Prince Eneas might be to help her, she had embroiled the son of Eion’s most powerful king in her own fight without his father’s permission. Even with the best will in the world, what chance did Eneas have to take back high-walled Southmarch, perched on a rock in the middle of a bay, with no ships and fewer than a thousand men at his command?

  “Do not fret yourself,” the prince told her. “We go to see what we will see, and only then will we concern ourselves with tactics. Your father was a famously clever man—surely he taught you not to make plans without some idea of the land and conditions ...”

  “Is,” she said. “He still is. I know he lives—I know it!”

  “Of course, Princess.” Eneas looked genuinely pained. “I did not mean . . . I spoke clumsily. ...”

  “It is not your fault.” She shook her head. “Sometimes I speak that way, too, and even think that way. It has been so long since I saw him! My friend Dowan said he felt certain I would see my father again, at least once ...” She had to stop speaking for a moment, for fear of crying. The thought of poor, dead Dowan was too much for an already overburdened heart.

  Prince Eneas was strong and kind and reassuring. It would have been easy for Briony to give everything over into his care—her promise to take her kingdom back, her other hopes and fears, even herself—but she just could not do it. Something perverse was always at work in her, she feared, the same perversity that had so often put her at odds with her counselors and even her own attendants. She would not let anyone, even someone as reliable as Eneas—especially someone as reliable as Eneas—take her burdens from her. She found it hard enough trusting Dawet dan-Faar to do things she couldn’t or wouldn’t do herself, but at least the Tuani adventurer did not treat her the way a benevolent uncle would. In fact, Dawet seemed truly to admire her stubbornness.

  Briony could not help wondering what kind of husband the dangerous Dawet would make. He would demand his own freedom, but he would give her freedoms of her own. . . .

  And what of Ferras Vansen? Was he as shy as he seemed? She could not forget the way he always avoided her eyes. Was she imagining the man’s feelings for her? But there had been moments—bright, fierce moments when their eyes had met and she was certain something had passed between them. At the time she had not really understood, but she did not think she was wrong. She had grown since then and felt more certain of her own ideas. The problem was, she was not completely certain how she felt about Vansen, and was even less certain that it was appropriate for her to think of him at all. He was a commoner, was he not? They could have no future.

  Which brought her back again in a weary circle to Eneas, who deserved better. He had made it very clear that he cared for her and would make an eminently sensible match. Why, then, she wondered as she looked at him, tall, handsome, at ease with all that was manly and appropriate, did she find herself less than overwhelmed?

  Every unmarried woman in Tessis would laugh me to scorn if they knew, she thought. And then trample me into the dust in their hurry to reach him.

  Eneas had certainly told the truth when he said his men were trained to move quickly: ten pentecount of foot soldiers and over a hundred well-armored knights, with grooms and other servants making nearly a thousand men altogether, managed some days to travel as far as ten leagues. But even after all that riding, the work of the Temple Dogs was nowhere near finished. Making camp brought with it dozens of other chores. The men were organized ten to a tent-group in the old Hierosoline manner, each group of ten responsible for their own cooking and for contributing sentries, as well as digging their own section of the defensive ditch around the perimeter of the camp, which they did every night, whether they stopped near a tiny Syannese village, beside the walls of a large town, or, as now, in the nearly empty wilderness between settlements.

  Briony didn’t understand, but Eneas explained. “If I take pity and allow them to go a night without digging the ditch and then nothing bad happens, they will come to think it unnecessary and chafe at the work. Better to make it as familiar as breathing—is that not true, Miron?”

  “Yes, Highness,” said his earnest lieutenant. “The Duke of Veryon was caught unawares at Potmis Bridge and nearly his entire army was routed and destroyed.”

  Briony wasn’t terribly familiar with Syannese military history but she understood the point.

  The men also had to bake their own bread, draw water, and choose lots for the order of sentry duty, all before bedding down for the night. With such long days full of duty and precious little in the way of diversion in this part of the north, it was a credit to Eneas and his generalship that the men looked fit and morale was generally good.

  So why am I such a fool? Briony thought. Why can I not love a man like Eneas? And is love even necessary? Father didn’t know Mother before the marriage was arranged, but although she died when we were born he still mourns her.

  Thus it was that the Syannese troop quickly made its way north from the border of Syan and through the corner of Silverside, crossing far to the west of the trade city of Onsilpia’s Veil and into Southmarch itself. It was a part of the country that Briony did not know well, iron and copper and coal country, as her father had taught her, centered around mines in the high hills and sheep country to the west, grass downs where domestic animals far outnumbered the people and whose farmers and herdsmen provided wool to much of the north. Now, though, it looked as though a great wind had come and blown the people themselves away, leaving behind houses, barns, byres, and fields that had gone to weeds. The Qar themselves, in their march down from the Shadowline, had passed at least a league or two to the west, but the effect of their passage seemed to have emptied the land like a plague.

  The saddest and most telling example of the exodus was a doll made of straw, a fine piece of craft Briony spotted by the side of the road. It seemed so forlorn there, in the middle of a desolate stretch of rocky meadow that she dismounted and picked it up.

  One of the doll’s wooden button eyes was missing, and it was discolored from the rains that had swept through in previous days, but otherwise it was unharmed. It had clearly been someone’s treasure, dressed in a cleverly made gown and hat, hair of golden thread—a fine court lady in miniature. Only a family in a desperate hurry would have dropped such a thing and not come back to search for it, and Briony could easily imagine the little girl who was doubtless still crying herself to sleep at night over her loss.

  As spring days passed, they made their way up through Southmarch toward the Settland Road, which would lead them almost due east to the shores of Brenn’s Bay. By the end of the first tennight in Hexamene they had reached Candlerstown, the site of the first attack by the fairy folk on the cities of men. There was little of the town left to see—the walls had been torn down in dozens of places, almost with what seemed like careless malice, as a child might kick down something a rival had built before hurrying home for supper. But the blackened ruins of the houses, softened only slightly by the grasses that had begun to grow up through what had once been well-tended streets to cover the charred wreckage in a fragile net of green, spoke of a malice that was far from careless. By the time they had left the ruins of Candlerstown behind, Briony was shivering as though from a winter chill. The Syannese soldiers, for whom the Qar to this point had been largely abstract, were also wide-eyed and troubled, and even Eneas could not entirely mask his unease.

 
“These fairy creatures are monsters,” he said as they made camp that night, well out of sight of the blackened, lifeless city. “Worse than monsters.”

  “Worse than monsters, yes, but only because they are as clever as we are—maybe more so.” She thought of the tale the merchant Raemon Beck had told her, how the creatures had appeared almost from nowhere. “Don’t underestimate them, Eneas. They’re not beasts.”

  Over the next two days they crossed eastward through the Dale country. They made early camp one evening in a river valley to give the soldiers a chance to bathe, and also because the narrow outlet from this valley to the next made Eneas cautious: the narrow pass seemed a very good place for an ambush, leaving them largely defenseless against anyone who might be lurking above the road with arrows or even stones.

  The first set of scouts came back in a hurry, excitement plain in the way they rode, and the Temple Dogs’ sergeants—called “penteneries,” also in the old Hierosoline manner—had all they could do to keep the men who were setting up camp working in an orderly fashion.

  “Fighting, sir,” Miron reported when he had taken the scouts’ reports. “At the far end of the next valley there’s a hill town with good-sized walls, but there’s not much left of it. Looks like the fairies tore it down. But if they did, they’re still there and they’re fighting with ordinary men right on the valley road!”

  “Kleaswell Market,” Briony said, heart beating fast. She had thought she was ready to meet the Qar face-to-face, but suddenly she was not so sure. “That’s the name of the town. People come from all over this part of Southmarch for the holiday market. I mean, they used to come ...”

  “How many of each?” Eneas demanded.

  Miron thought hard. “Seems as though neither force is as large as ours, Highness, although it’s hard to be certain—by the time the scouts got far enough up the valley to see the town, it was getting near dark and they didn’t want to risk going closer and being noticed by the goblins. You said they can see a long way.”

  “Very well. There is nothing we can do tonight. Put the sentries on quiet watch, and we will move out in the watch before dawn—that way we have a chance of getting close before the sun is above the hills.”

  That night, Briony left her meal with Eneas and his officers early and returned to her tent. She wasn’t hungry, and she was too anxious to make conversation. The men had been too excited to pay much attention to her anyway. They were like small boys, she decided—females were acceptable company, but only until something really important came along. Even Eneas, Briony could not help noticing, had showed a bit of childlike enthusiasm, talking avidly about tactics. The prince was not a fool, and he had been planning carefully with an eye toward keeping his own men as safe as possible, but Briony still saw something in his excited conversation that reminded her of her brothers arguing over quoits.

  But even the work of getting herself ready for bed without the help of servants, a once-unfamiliar task now become quite ordinary, did not tire Briony enough to bring sleep quickly. Instead she lay in a bed that (like almost everything else in camp) smelled of the animals that carried the bags each day, listening to the quiet, intermittent calls of the camp sentries declaring that all was well. Between calls, she thought of the men of her family, scattered or entirely lost, and in the darkness and solitude of her tent, which alone in the camp she shared with no other person, Briony Eddon wept.

  The fairies’ attack had either never stopped for darkness or had resumed with the first light. The sun had still not crested the hills when the Syannese troop reached the end of the far valley and could see the broken walls of Kleaswell Market, but the first thing they saw was that men—and Qar—had already died this day in plenty.

  The mortal defenders had taken up position atop a small hill on the far side of the road, protected in part from Qar arrows by the thick branches of trees. The fairy folk, a small force of which only a few pentecounts at the most were visible, had adopted an attacker’s strategy and were besieging the small hill. At first it was hard to tell whether the Qar were much different from their human enemies—only their strangely-shaped banners and the equally unusual colors of their armor suggested otherwise—but as Eneas gave the order and his troops hurried up the road toward the rise at the end of the valley, Briony began to see more telling differences: one of the fairy commanders, who wore what Briony at first thought was a helmet decorated with antlers, proved not to be wearing a helmet at all. A group of small manlike shapes who seemed to be dressed in long tattered robes of black and brown were in fact naked. All of them fought fiercely, though, and with a strange absence of any sort of tactics that Briony could recognize. They swarmed like insects, and like insects, seemed to have some unspoken way of knowing what they should do next, because, when they changed method or direction of attack, they all changed together, without any sign or word being passed as far as she could tell.

  The mortal men they were attacking seemed to be a mixed lot of well-armed soldiers and unarmed or lightly armed civilians—merchants, perhaps, since many wagons had been drawn together at the top of the hill they defended. They flew no recognizable banner, but Briony recognized a few of the crests on men’s shields and surcoats as Kracian. Mercenaries, she decided, hired to protect a caravan—but why hired from so far away? And why was a caravan moving through such dangerous territory in the first place? Surely the castle itself must be receiving most of its supplies from the sea, as it had been doing even before Briony left Southmarch behind.

  She had little time to think about this because just then the fairies seemed to notice Eneas and his oncoming troop for the first time. Arrows began to leap toward them.

  The prince abruptly interposed his horse between her and the distant Qar, driving her off the road. “You will not risk your life, Princess.”

  “But I can fight!” Briony realized as she said it that it was foolish, but she could not help it. “You’re a prince, and you’re not hiding . . . !”

  “Without you, your people have nothing. I have two brothers and a father who will live many years yet.” His face was hard: it was clear no argument would be entertained. A moment later he gave her horse a slap on the rump to propel it farther off the road, then wheeled his own mount and spurred back toward his men.

  The Qar soldiers had not been waiting idly. By the time the first of the Syannese riders reached them, they had formed a makeshift spear wall , some with actual pikes and spears, others by grabbing any long piece of wood they could reach and turning it toward the oncoming horsemen. Briony was almost as frightened for the horses as she was for the men, and as the vanguard of the charge struck, she had to close her eyes. She did not see it, but she heard the terrible, savage crash of splintering wood and screaming men and horses—and fairies, she could only presume, because no living thing could be struck that way and not cry out.

  Within moments, the main part of Eneas’ troop had broken through and was wheeling back around to assault the fairies from the other side. Other soldiers and their Qar enemies had broken apart into knots of combat. The fighting was fierce, and Briony several times saw Syannese soldiers fall to the ground, pierced by an arrow or spear or sword thrust, but the fairies had obviously been taken by surprise and were slow to recover. Also, Briony saw nothing of the magical trickery she had heard that the Twilight People used at Kolkan’s Field and in other encounters with the Southmarch soldiers. What exactly was going on here? If the Qar were still besieging Southmarch, why should they be trying to destroy a supply train so far to the west of the castle? And how had the merchants who hired the Kracian mercenaries expected to get their caravan into a surrounded castle even if they reached the shore of the bay? It was a mystery.

  She heard a shriek of dismay and turned in time to see something charging down out of the woods that at first she took to be a bear or something stranger still—a bull, perhaps, but running on its hind legs. The thing had a huge, square head and a back as broad as an ox-yoke, and it carried a sort of b
laded club in its hands, a horrible weapon with several massive stone axes bound into the wide shaft. It charged right into the center of Eneas’ men with weapon flailing and knocked several of them through the air like shuttlecocks to land crushed and bleeding at the side of the road, but other Syannese foot soldiers charged toward the thing, pikes lowered, and hemmed the monster in, jabbing and then falling back as it swung its club at them, stabbing at it again when it turned away. Despite its strength, the thing could not escape its smaller persecutors and was soon bleeding from several dozen wounds. The monster’s face twisted in a rictus of agony as it threw back its head and bellowed its pain and rage. Moments later, it tried to break out of the circle of its attackers, reminding her of the day so long ago when Kendrick and the others had hunted the wyvern in the hills of the Southmarch mainland, but several more spears pierced the huge Qar fighter, one of them all the way through the throat, freeing a freshet of bright red blood. The great, dark creature swayed and then collapsed. The soldiers cried out in terrified triumph and surged forward, stabbing it and even kicking it repeatedly.

  Eneas himself, who had caught up to his men in time to join their charge through the thick part of the Qar line, had been immediately surrounded by a group of small, dark things that, were it not for their short stabbing swords, might have been mistaken for apes, but between his lance and his own sword he had made short work of them, aided by his warhorse and its heavily shod hooves. A group of Syannese riflemen had set up on the edge of the fighting and started firing into the knot of Qar farther up the slope, scattering them in retreat across the slope only moments after the merchants and their mercenaries had seemed on the verge of being eradicated.