by Tim Stead
But more than that, Skal could not see an end to the war. Telas’s armies were scattered and broken. This six thousand, half of which was Avilian, represented their greatest asset. Even in the best of times they would have struggled to raise twelve thousand good men, and now that was just a dream. Seth Yarra seemed to have unlimited forces at their beck.
He could see no relief coming from Avilian or Berash. They would be too stretched defending their own borders. Anyone who went to Telas Alt would surely perish there.
“I will still go to Telas Alt,” Hestia said.
“You cannot,” Skal said. “It is certain death, suicide.”
“You will not support me?” Hestia asked, and there was a sting in her question. He had promised to support her, to see her in Telas Alt.
“If you go, I will go with you,” he said. “But if you value my advice at all, I say that we should not go. We will starve to death before spring.”
“Are you a mooncalf, Skal?” Passerina asked. “You have just said that to go is to die, and now you say you will go.”
“I swore it, Deus.”
“You swore when these facts were hidden from you. This news unbinds you from that promise. Hestia,” she turned to the queen. “Why would you wish to drag these men to their deaths?”
“I have no choice,” Hestia replied. “I am nothing if I flee, and more than that in Telas Alt. I would rather be a queen who died defending her realm than one who ran away.”
“And these must die with you to improve your sense of worth?” Passerina was scornful.
“It is their choice,” Hestia replied.
“Choice? If they were men it would be a choice, but they are sheep, brave sheep I grant you, but sheep none the less.”
“Deus,” Skal interrupted. “It is indeed my choice. I would be shamed if I abandoned my honour so much.”
“You can get over shame,” Passerina snapped back. “You can’t get over death. And what of your Avilian sheep? Will they follow their shepherd onto Seth Yarra steel?”
This rebuke also stung. Skal cared what happened to his men. He had learned that from Cain. Now he was torn between his duty to them and his honour. He was bright enough to know that if he ordered his men back to the wall they would go, but that he would then be useless to Hestia. She didn’t need one sword, no matter how good. She needed his three thousand men. He needed a third choice. If Telas Alt was death for them all and a retreat into Berash was unthinkable for Hestia, then there must be something else.
“Apart from Telas Alt, what is your most formidable stronghold?” he asked.
Hestia hesitated. She knew the answer. She was trying to think what Skal was thinking, and it didn’t take her long to get there.
“Porter’s Pass, on the border with Durandar,” she said. “There’s nothing in the kingdom like it. You think we should go there?”
“We could hold it,” he said.
“But why? Why would we want to hold Porter’s Pass? Telas Alt is the capital. It’s everything. The palace, the Lion Throne, the temple of Ashmaren – everything.”
“It’s a death trap,” Skal said.
“You will not come to Telas Alt?” It was a challenge to his honour. Skal looked her in the eye. He had to tell her that Telas Alt was a lost cause.
“I will. I swore as much. My men will not.” He saw the look on her face, saw that she understood. “Porter’s Pass may be nothing, but it is Telan. It can be a symbol that you are not defeated, a rallying point for your people.”
“You have not seen Porter’s Pass,” she said.
“What is the garrison?” he asked.
“Two hundred. No more than that.”
“And how many can it hold?”
“Not all of us. It is big, but no more than two thousand men can occupy it, and it would be crowded then. It is not big enough.”
One of the Telan nobles jumped into the conversation with both feet. “The Western Chain, my Queen!” he said. Hestia looked at him as though he were an annoyance.
“What is the Western Chain?” Skal asked.
“It is a defensive chain of forts, Lord Skal,” the man went on, heedless of his queen’s displeasure. “Terresh’s father began the work, and now it is all but finished. There are seven forts, all capable of supporting each other, and linked by walls and trenches and tunnels. They would hold ten thousand.”
“Queen Hestia?” Skal turned to her, seeking confirmation. She was still set on Telas Alt, though he was sure that she saw that prize slipping away even as they spoke. She could still insist, but it would seem contrary now, even foolhardy. With a mild sense of insight he realised that perhaps Hestia wanted to die. She had lost Terresh, she had won the enmity of Wolf Narak, and she had all but lost Telas itself to invaders. Nor could she put the blame at Terresh’s door. She had been his closest, must trusted advisor, and Skal suspected that the strategy had been hers.
“Why would we want to hold the Western Chain?” she said. “It is in the poorest part of the land. The country there is cold and bleak. Its purpose it to guard against Durandar. There is nothing there worth holding.”
“They are Telan strongholds on Telan land,” Skal said. “As long as they can be held, Telas is undefeated.”
She looked at Skal, and he could see what she thought in her eyes. There was no point to it. If they held the Western Chain for a year, for three years, then it was all the same. The Seth Yarra would land more men, and more men still, an endless mass of dedicated warriors to send against them until at last the chain fell, one fort at a time, either to invasion or starvation. The end would be the same. Why not stand in Telas Alt and get it over with in one glorious battle?
Passerina had not spoken for some time. The sparrow had been listening intently to their exchange, but now she spoke.
“You should listen to Lord Skal,” she said. “His advice is sound, and I can tell you that Narak does not believe that victory is impossible. He has even hinted that Seth Yarra have already lost, but the cause of their undoing is hidden to us all.”
“Victory?” Hestia was as scornful as she dared to be. “He cannot burn the forest twice.”
Passerina looked into Hestia’s eyes until the queen was forced to look away. “Armies cannot be replaced once they are lost,” she said. “Armies are more valuable than kings, or queens.”
It was a simple enough statement, and the threat it contained was plain enough. There was nobody here who could stand against the sparrow, none who could save Hestia from a god’s wrath should it be provoked.
“I will do as you say, Deus,” Hestia said, but her tone was bitter. A glorious death on the walls of Telas Alt was one thing, but to be struck down by a god on the roadside a dozen miles from anywhere would be pointless. Skal had some sympathy for her, but in his heart he was glad. Now there was a chance. They would turn around, riders would be sent ahead to ensure that the forts were safe and the task of gathering in food had begun, and there was a chance at least that they might yet survive.
It all depended on Narak.
58. The Virtue of Mercy
They were coming. The last of his scouts had ridden in through the false palisade with the news. They were less than a mile away and coming on fast.
Cain sat calmly on the top of his wire and stone wall and waited. His men were in their positions, they knew what to do, and this was something he had anticipated. He felt no alarm or fear. He was quite the master of the situation, and with Sheyani beside him he was invulnerable, or he felt that way. He watched as his men followed the patterns laid down for them like clockwork. The archers pulled back, forming a line between the wall and the palisade, and the assigned men on the wall lowered the ramp to give them an escape route. Still other men remained behind in the palisade, their horses waiting to whisk them away to safety.
The gate was one of his strangest ideas. How do you put a gate in a temporary wall? His answer was that you didn’t. You put the gate over it. His men had used timber from the wagons
and some logs that had not been needed for the palisade to construct a ramp that they could slide over the steep side of the wall. It was matched by another ramp of the stepped side so that the one facing the enemy could be pulled up by teams of men and settled on top of the other. While it was down anyone could simply ride or walk up one side and down the other. When it was pulled back the wall presented a uniform sheer face.
Narak’s trick had not killed all the Seth Yarra. He had never thought that it would. Some would survive, throwing themselves into streams, climbing over the bare lower slopes of the mountains, or simply through luck.
Of the fifty thousand there were just over three thousand survivors, and that was all right. He had three thousand and a wall to defend. Seth Yarra would need six thousand to have a chance of taking it, and they had no ladders, and there was no wood to build ladders. Narak had burned it all.
He waited.
“It will be a slaughter,” Sheyani said. She was sitting one step down from him, her pipes in hand.
“They will turn back,” Cain said. “When they see the wall and know what it means they will turn back. They will probably retreat into Telas to lick their wounds, those that are left. No commander would assault a wall with no ladders and inferior numbers”
Sheyani did not say anything for a moment. “Did you smell the fire?” she asked, and shuddered. Cain had smelled it clearly enough, the faint aroma of burning flesh mingled in with the wood smoke. They had been too far away to hear the screams. “A terrible way to die,” she said.
Cain could only agree, but this was a coarse war. The enemy had numbers and were themselves no respecters of any code. What they had done in the south, the rampage that Skal had ended at Henfray, had shown that. Cain had no great desire for revenge, but he would kill the enemy until they gave in or he was killed himself. Sheyani still thought in terms of the chivalric code of Karim, and given the choice Cain would have agreed with her, but Seth Yarra were not so bound.
In the distance he saw arms raised, and heard voices carried back on the breeze, which still blew fresh from the west.
A few moments later he saw twenty horses break from the palisade and ride towards the wall. They passed his archers and turned, waiting behind them in case cover was needed for a retreat.
The first of the Seth Yarra came through. They looked ragged.
The archers loosed their arrows, but they did not shoot at the men running towards them, but instead their fiery missiles arced over the Seth Yarra heads, plunging into the brushwood and oil that was waiting in the false palisade.
If Cain was right the palisade would be packed by now. The men at the back would be pressing forwards, the men inside compressed by the design that would allow one man out for every two that went in.
It erupted into flame. The violence of it startled even Cain. The brushwood was very dry, as were the logs of the palisade itself. With the assistance of the oil they burned like tinder, the flames shooting up into the sky. It was as though he had imitated Narak’s great fire, when in truth the opposite was true. Cain had planned this from the start, a winnowing of the enemy before they ever touched his wall. This had been the plan he had laid out for the lords at Bas Erinor, and Narak had copied him on a scale that only Narak could.
This time they heard the screams.
Some of the Seth Yarra who had come through before the fire took hold turned, and ran back into the flames. They had comrades in there, Cain supposed, friends. It was a suicidally brave thing to do. The remaining men of the advance guard were cut down by Cain’s archers in just two volleys.
So that was it, then. He forced himself to watch as the flames blossomed and then died into smoke and ashes. The wind brought them the smell of burned meat again, like pork left too long on the fire.
The riders, then the archers came back over the ramps. The outer ramp was pulled in and slid back over the inner ramp. Soon the fire would die down enough and what remained of the Seth Yarra force would come, but for now they waited. He looked left and right and saw his men were ready. They needed no word from him. They stood grim faced with swords, lances and bows behind the top step and looked towards the dying fire.
If they had any sense the Seth Yarra would turn back now. Cain didn’t expect them to. There would be at least one charge. They were nothing if not predictable. Narak had told him that they fought using tactics taken from a book, and it certainly seemed that way. They fought in patterns, they marched in patterns and they camped in patterns. It was always the same. The patterns themselves were not bad. Indeed they seemed sensible the first time you saw them, but to see the same attack repeated over and over against an enemy that expected it was sheer stupidity. It was all too rigid.
Sheyani stood. “I will go back to the tent,” she said. “You do not need me and I am tired. I do not need to see this victory.”
He nodded. He understood. Narak had promised that he would be relieved in a few weeks, even though it was months until the snows came and sealed the pass. The fire had done the work for them, and no army would try the pass this year once this ragged remnant was gone. They would go back to Bas Erinor, and then on to his estate at Waterhill where they would spend the winter in peace, with just each other for company. It was good to heal after war.
The Seth Yarra came through earlier than he expected, trampling through the still hot ashes. They must have good boots, he thought, or they are desperate for a fight.
It seemed the latter, for they came on without forming up, almost as though they were keen to be the first to die. They ran in ones and twos, in small groups. They ran too far and tired to a stumbling walk by the time they were in bowshot, and then his archers began to pick them off.
Cain watched with growing horror as the rump of the Seth Yarra army hurled itself against his temporary wall. They were no longer soldiers, but animals driven mad by the fire and the terrible things they had witnessed. They had lost all care for self preservation. They had no officers, or none who behaved as officers. It was like watching a herd of cattle running over a cliff. They crashed into the stone and wire of the wall and clawed at it, as though somehow they could get to the top.
No, he was wrong, there were officers. He could see them trying to regain control. Here and there among the rabble there was a still point, a knot of sanity, but it was not enough. Cain’s men were standing on the walls firing down into the mass of the enemy who screamed hatred up at them as they died.
Sheyani had been right. It was not a battle.
Cain wanted to stop it, but he could not. Under his breath he encouraged the officers, urging them to drag their men back from destruction, but it seemed futile. The numbers who obeyed were small, and though order gained a foothold it was never more than that. Some of his men had run out of arrows and were throwing rocks down from the wall.
“Stop!” Cain ordered. It was a testament to the discipline of his men that they stopped. The Seth Yarra beneath the walls now numbered only about three hundred, and they struggled to attack through a sea of their comrades’ bodies, though they could not scale the wall, and beat at it with their fists and weapons as though they could break through the tons of rock through the power of their anguish alone.
Cain’s men stopped, and the silence atop the wall slowly seeped into the insane men beneath them, until after a while they all stood in silence. Just out of bowshot there was a group of Seth Yarra with two black clad cleansers, and they, too stopped and waited. It was like the eye of a storm.
“For the sake of your god and ours,” Cain called out in Afalel, “take these men away from here.”
His voice rang out down the pass, clear and loud in the silence. There was a brief discussion between the two cleansers, and then one of them walked forwards. He walked slowly and deliberately until he stood twenty paces from the wall beneath the point where Cain stood.
“What is this?” he asked.
“Mercy,” Cain replied.
“Why? We are your enemy.”
; “No,” Cain replied. “You are men come from another land at another’s bidding to invade my home. You are soldiers. I am a soldier. It is what you believe that is my enemy, and the man that sent you.”
“It was a god, not a man,” the cleanser replied.
Cain made a dismissive gesture. “I will not debate with you on the merits of your cause,” he said. “Take your men and go.”
“What is your name?” The cleanser asked.
“What is yours?”
