All of us, not just the Ouna-Mas, were covering our heads with veils. Those with power and influence traded slaves for airy cotton tunics. The merchants of the East delivered the fabrics and collected the doomed. It was the third summer of the campaign, but man and horse were boiling in a golden pot of sand for so long that I forgot all other seasons. We moved less under the sun and more after dusk to avoid the deathly heat of noon. There was no turning back.
The Truthsayers and the Legendmakers had deserted us. Most of the Ouna-Mas, the Reghen, the Rods, and even Malan, returned to Kapoukia before we crossed Uruat and waited to catch up with us in autumn when we would be arriving in Varazam. The Blades kept going forward.
The Reghen told me, “We need to go back to manage supplies, garrisons, and so many trade posts. We left thousands to guard the outposts and the supply roads all the way back to the steppe. You go ahead. Send us word of what you found, and we’ll make the Legends afterward.”
Words were forgotten and drowned in the cruel peace of the sandy hills. We soon adapted to life in the desert. The sheep and the mare milk would not keep in the heat for even half a day. We dried it in the sun, made it into powder, and mixed it every night with barley and water. Many times, that was the only meal of the day; if we were lucky, we would share some horse meat. In the middle of the day, there was no need to cook or light a fire; we just left the thin slices under our saddles from midday to sunset. The horse’s sweat, salty and hot, softened and cooked the meat enough for us to chew. The green dung would dry to brown fast in the sun, and we used it to feed the night’s fires. Wood was valuable in the desert, and no animal could be spared to carry wood for cooking.
Autumn came and went fast as we camped, buried among the dunes, waiting for Malan and his entourage to catch up with us. We were just half a moon’s slow ride away from Varazam, the Trackers said, but we sat idle many times for days waiting for supplies and water to reach us. On a starless winter night, we finally saw the dancing flames on the battlements of Varazam. The thousands of city torches were glowing as one cloud of golden dust above the walls, and that sight fed the men with fury, and made their hunger unbearable. Most of us wanted to take the city that same night and drink its blood, water, and marrow.
“Patience. We will be in there by the next full moon, the Long Winter Night Moon,” the Reghen told us when we first saw the walls. For many moons afterward, whenever they saw a Reghen, my men would turn around and whisper to one another mockingly:
“The Long Night Moon…”
Thirteen moons would fill and empty with Selene’s light, thirteen times the deep moats would fill and empty with corpses until we succeeded. The master of Varazam was a coward, a rat without honor who chose to hide behind the wonder that his craftsmen had built. He already had lost the best of his army at Melea, but since then he had managed to secure plenty of supplies.
Malan had sent a Reghen to discuss terms, and the nobles of Varazam accepted him. They led him blindfolded to a windowless cavern of the palace, where they discussed the proposed peace terms. The Reghen saw only the arrogance on the faces of the nobles, so he didn’t have much to tell us about the city. In our dreams, it was made of gold—soft, cool, and female, with legs wide open. Malan’s only peace proposal was the complete surrender of Varazam. He had sent the Reghen to spy rather than to discuss. The othertribers threw him out, and the cross banners of Varazam kept waving arrogantly in front of us each morning.
The Reghen returned along with a messenger from Varazam. He was an elderly balding man, hardly able to walk, who read slowly and austerely from a parchment in his tongue. Khormi was translating the words of the messenger.
“From the lord of Varazam, to my uninvited guests. Welcome, you heathen dogs to my kingdom. Feast on the sand and wind, break your heads on my walls, fill the moat with your children. Plunder the empty villages, fuck the dead goats. And return to the hellhole you crawled out from.”
Khormi’s jaw was trembling on every word, and he kept shaking his head as he translated, as if he were trying to remind everyone that these were not his own words. The white-haired messenger was taken away at Malan’s signal. A second signal from the Khun came a few breaths later, and the maulers charged out of the tent barking. The old man didn’t scream for long. It all turned silent again very soon.
“We’ll need different machines to bring down those walls,” said the Reghen.
“We are building battering rams, catapults, and tall siege towers,” answered the First Craftsman.
The Craftsmen were the only ones who remained busy, building the siege machines from the oaks of Uruat.
“There are over twenty thousand in there. The water won’t last even for two moons,” said the Tracker.
It took us some time to find all the underground aqueducts that collected and streamed water into the city. Few were visible above ground. The Ouna-Mas ordered us to search the ends of the Empire for hellebores, the purple-black wild roses, and poison the water supply with them. Their knowledge of the death flowers and herbs impressed the men, but the desert doesn’t heed the orders of the Witches. There weren’t any flowers around, and no one wanted to ride to the ends of the Empire to cut wild roses. The Blades came up with a simpler plan. We threw worm-infested carcasses into the aqueducts. They would do.
Archers and Blades sat and admired the walls that rose fearless and high as fifteen men, and four paces deep as the slaves claimed. No blade or arrow would ever get through those heavy stones. Moats eight paces deep and ten paces wide encircled the walls and drowned the plans and the curses of our Craftsmen. There was not much for us to do. Only to obey the Craftsmen’s orders, chop and carry wood and stone.
The battering rams, logs with iron ends to break the main gate, were the first things we tried. We protected them under wooden tortoises pushed by slaves and oxen. The logs were suspended with ropes from the top of the tortoise so they could swing with force. Wet hides covered each tortoise, but in the end, most of them got burnt by the pine-pitch-seeped arrows of the besieged. We made a bigger ram and covered it with baked clay, iron slabs, and even wet weeds brought all the way from the river. That one almost made it to the main gate, but the earth below yielded to its weight, bringing down the structure and killing most of the slaves.
“More rams. Bigger!” Malan ordered.
The Craftsmen told him we didn’t have enough strong animals to carry bigger rams. But out of fear of ending up like the First of the Trackers, they tried other things. They covered the battering ram by weaving lightweight boughs together instead of using iron and wood. The whole structure was not as heavy, though it was bigger, so they put it on wheels. Fewer than forty men were enough to push it. The captured craftsmen of the othertribers suggested—after the Ssons flayed a couple of them— that we build sambucae, ladders covered from all sides like a tunnel that led to a flat platform on top. Those could be raised quickly and allow five and ten men to climb high and be in the shooting range of those defenders behind the walls. They tried to give the rams a chance with these contraptions, but the besieged caught the sambucae with ropes and grapnels, pulled them toward the walls, and shattered them, throwing the brave Archers to their deaths. This was not the battle of bow and horse we were used to. The horses were useful only as meat in Varazam. The mules and oxen were the ones that did all the dirty work.
The slaves were whipped mercilessly as they filled the moat with dirt, stones and wood and the bodies of the dead, and pulled the lightweight structure again to the front of the main gate. At the height of spring, the ram broke through the main gate, but it proved to be a trap leading only to an enclosed small bailey without any exits and with high walls all around. The bailey became an enormous cauldron as the burning oil fell upon our men.
Everyone talked about the burning oil because when it stuck to the skin, it brought out the loudest demon screams. Yet the besieged rarely used it. They usually baked sand or quicklime in wide pans and flung clouds of dust at us. Nothing would st
op this storm of sandfire; it got into every hole of the head—eyes, ears, and nose—and it pierced deeply through every garment, searing the flesh to the bone. Hundreds of slaves and warriors, the best and strongest, were roasted alive when that gate went down. To this day, I still don’t know where the main gate of Varazam was. I never learned. They had walled it long before we came and relied on labyrinths of smaller gates and underground passageways that the besieged changed regularly.
The Blades gathered more slaves and prisoners for the rams. It was the peasants of the Southeastern Empire who pushed the battering rams against their own people. They approached the walls with pleas and prayers in the tongue of the Crossers, but their god replied with burning oil that melted their flesh. Others were crushed by the rocks and pierced by the arrows of the besieged. They were the lucky ones. A worse death at the hands of the Ssons awaited those who fled or refused. The Archers had them within constant range to make sure no one would get away. It was a battle of prayer, scream, and cries. No battle hymns of warriors. The Craftsmen fought, and the slaves fought until there were hardly any slaves left alive. The dead filled the moats as they fell, and the only thing that rose was the smell of rotting bodies. The besieged fished out the dead with hooks from above, piece by piece, to burn them before the tainted air fouled the city.
The Great Feast of Spring came again, but it was brief and miserable in the middle of the desert. Sah-Ouna insisted on her prophecy:
“Wood will prevail over stone.”
Malan sent a message to all the garrisons, to all the suppliers and the Hunters left behind, to bring more wood. And that’s how another spring and summer passed, with us waking up every morning to see a wall that just wouldn’t fall. Our only task was to patrol the perimeters of Varazam and keep the blockade, ensuring that nothing went in or out of the city. The Archers shot down even the small birds and the hawks that dared to fly above. We caught a few messengers escaping from Varazam to bring news or pleas to other cities.
Malan was outraged even when we caught them. To him, that was evidence that some had escaped. They were not coming down from the walls. It seemed as if they were emerging from under the sand—like worms. In midsummer, Malan called the Leaders to gather for yet another war council. The Khun’s tent stood more than a thousand paces away from the walls. It was built large and almost identical to the one he had in Sirol. He was sending a message that we planned on staying around as long as it would take, but it was also an insult to our men who woke up every morning looking like ghosts, their eyes, stomachs, and nostrils filled with sand. If that wasn’t enough, Malan built three more identical tents, and only a few knew which one he used from day to day.
“It’s for safety, so that they don’t know where he is. These Crossers have assassins, murderers who can even change shape, crawl under the sand, and slip through the night unseen,” said the Chief of the Rods.
“Good idea. I hope those Deadwalkers have fewer than four assassins,” I said. The myth of the shape-changing worm-crawling assassins who took the form of any animal they chose served only as a popular excuse among the sleeping guards whenever some othertriber broke the blockade.
“You’re getting old, Da-Ren. Your words are bitter,” the Chief of the Rods answered.
I had grown too old and tired in my twenty-third summer. The red swords of the sun cracked my skin, and the night’s cold hardened it like old pine bark. The desert wind carried the flies, the fleas, and the lice, and brought them to sleep and feast on my flesh. At night, I would dream that the east wind stole my dying body, piece by piece, and transported it back to the Forest, to Zeria’s pond. One morning, I would wake, and my whole body would be back there. And then with one single thought, I’d return to her. Later in my life, when I read the words of the wise men at the Castlemonastery, I learned that people did indeed write letters to one another when separated from their lovers. They wrote them on papyri, dry sheets of tree bark, as dead as my skin, and sent them to tell of their hopes, their lies, and their dreams to each other. The Reghen had trained many scribes, not to write love letters, but to communicate with the garrisons across every city we passed.
“By Darhul’s nine curses, I hope that they hide mountains of gold behind these walls to make all this worthwhile,” Karat, the Leader of the Archers, said to the Reghen as he entered Malan’s tent. Malan had not yet arrived. When he did, Karat kept his mouth shut.
The Reghen addressed the Khun first, in a low, serious voice, “The walls are more than fifteen men high, and those othertribers have spent their lives building every corner of them and know how to defend them.” The Reghen had to say something, to explain why his prediction of victory before the Long Winter Night had proven so wrong.
Malan nodded slowly and repeatedly with faked awe, as his hand rested gently on the Reghen’s shoulder. He pointed at him with the other hand for all to see. A warm smile of calm madness painted his face.
“First of your men, Leaders of the Tribe, look at him. This is a Reghen! After seven moons, he managed to measure the shadow of the walls and inform us of their exact height. We are all so glad for his wit and wisdom. Anyone else?”
The First Craftsman brought in two of his assistants who had been waiting outside. They carried a small wooden model that came up to my waist and placed it on a large table in the center of Malan’s tent. They were so proud of it that they were smiling, even though they did not let us know what it was supposed to be. What I saw was a wooden tower on wheels with nine stories filled with countless tiny clay warriors.
“So?” I asked.
“We’ll build one just like this, but as tall as twenty men, so we can drop a platform and land our men at the height of the battlements,” said the First Craftsman. “Each story is covered with wooden planks, and there are ladders inside so the men can climb up and down. We’ll put a small pathway around it so men can get outside to put out the fires. And we’ll even have hoses to transport water, made from hollow reed and covered with double horse bowel. We’ll roof the tower with iron and wet hides. And ramps that drop to reach the battlements. Oh, I said that already, didn’t I?” He was excited at the sound of his own words.
“How many men will fit in this thing?”
“We call this thing a siege tower, and it takes six hundred men.”
“And what will push this monster? Enaka with Pelor?”
“Oxen, the strongest oxen.”
“The strongest oxen will roast together with your towers.”
The First Craftsman had fought hard for this. He and his men had thought out most of the problems. Almost all of them.
“At night, we’ll stake iron-covered pulleys as close to the walls as we can get. The oxen will pull away from the wall, and the siege tower will move closer to the wall.”
It sounded like a good plan. For someone who would be observing from afar.
“What do you want from us?” Karat asked as if he knew what was coming.
“To fill the towers.”
“With what?”
“With Archers.”
Karat shook his head and looked at Malan.
“My Khun, if this works, we will have man fighting man on the battlements. Blade with blade. The Archers cannot fight without horse.”
Malan looked at me as if he agreed with Karat.
The laughter of despair. I didn’t know it when I was younger, but I picked it up during the last summer in Kapoukia when I heard it escaping the throats of half-crazed women a few moments before they died. They laughed and cried at the same time in madness. I grabbed the wooden model and lifted with my right hand. Its small wooden sticks would become giant beams. It was wide at its base and narrowed with every floor. I took a few steps away from the table and held it above the coals of the open hearth.
“We will cover it with wet hides,” the First Craftsman said with a crack in his voice.
“Sable? Squirrel?” I asked.
I broke out into a nervous laugh holding the tower in my hand.
The finger-size clay men fell helpless and melted silently on the coals. It would take all my men to fill those towers, and no one would come back alive.
“Do you know what you have built here, Craftsman?” I started laughing again. “A giant funeral pyre on wheels, with beams and skins, ready to go up in flames with hundreds of my men.”
“We must do something. These walls aren’t falling,” the Reghen jumped in. “At least this is some kind of a plan.”
“This is death and a funeral pyre together. I won’t put my men in that thing.”
Malan still hadn’t opened his mouth. Everyone sat in silence as if no one had anything to say.
“There won’t be even one Blade left,” I told him. “And you will pay for it in the battles that will follow. If it was not for the Blades in those previous battles… Remember what happened in the poppy fields?”
That sounded right to most of them.
“Da-Ren is right: we can’t just board all the Blades in one tower,” the Reghen said.
“The men don’t know how to fight like that, Khun-Malan. This is certain death. Put the Ssons up there since you believe so much in this plan,” I said.
The Ssons were fierce but mortal. One of them had challenged three of my men, and they managed to bring him down. They let him live. One Sson could overcome any of my men, but not three together.
“The Ssons are symbols to be feared and respected. They should not die in battle,” the Reghen said to Malan.
“And we should? For nothing? At least have the Archers clear the way for us.”
Malan spoke:
“We’ll try with one tower only and see what comes of it. Slaves on the lower level to push and on the middle levels to fight fires, Archers on top to clear the way, Blades on two lower levels. As you get closer to the walls, the Blades will climb up.”
“How many men can the two lower levels hold?” I asked.
Drakon Omnibus Page 63
