by Robin Hobb
What fun.
And Soldier’s Boy’s face was set in the same hard grin that it had worn on the long-ago day. He was exterminating vermin that had overrun his territory, and he felt nothing for them as they fell and died.
The fire gave a sudden roar, and then the entire roof erupted into flames. Shingles and pieces of burning rafter began to fall inside the building and the anguished screams grew louder. Then, with a sudden crack, the roof gave way and collapsed inside. It was over. The night darkened around us as the fire that had blazed overhead like a beacon suddenly folded in on itself. Soldier’s Boy gave his head a shake as if he were just waking. He looked around for his next target. More rats were hiding and must be rooted out.
Throughout the fort and town, other cries were heard: men shouting hoarsely for help, shrieks of death and despair. The flames had a voice of their own, hissing and crackling. Uneven light and wild leaping shadow populated the town. The screams of trapped horses still came from the inferno that had been the stable. The air thickened with smoke and blowing ash and floating sparks. I heard gunfire from the direction of the prison barracks, and wondered what was happening there. When it became obvious that no one else remained alive inside the barracks, Soldier’s Boy lifted his hand over his head. “Come!” he shouted. “Follow me!”
He nudged Clove and the big horse was glad to move away from the fire. I prayed that we were leaving, that the Specks’ lust for blood had been satisfied. Instead, Soldier’s Boy led us deeper into the fort. In the dark and the smoke I could scarcely tell where we were, but it soon became apparent that he was guiding us toward the sound of gunfire. The flames and the smoke combined to turn the night to a murky red sunset around us. We passed a dark alley. A young man, or perhaps a soldier’s son, clad only in a nightshirt, raced out of it. A Speck warrior was right behind him. He speared the boy, and then pinned him to the ground with his weapon as a sharp kick to the boy’s head ended his struggles. Soldier’s Boy didn’t even pause. He led his warriors on. From the corner of his eye, I saw the warrior jerk his spear from the boy’s body and fall in with us.
It penetrated my awareness that I was no longer hearing random shots, but organized volleys of fire. A surge of hope lifted me. Someone had rallied and imposed order on at least some of the troops. The same thought seemed to occur to Soldier’s Boy. Scowling, he shouted for Sempayli, and then ordered him to find the other warriors and bring them to join him. His lieutenant nodded curtly and ran off into the smoke and darkness. Soldier’s Boy rode on toward the prison.
Soldier’s Boy’s plan had been to simultaneously set fire to the prison while freeing the prisoners to add to the chaos. I think I recognized what had happened before he did. The freed prisoners, confronted with the marauding Specks, had not fled but had seized whatever they could find to use as weapons and attacked their liberators. Perhaps they had not perceived the Specks were deliberately freeing them, or perhaps they had simply chosen to side with their countrymen when faced with savages with unknown intentions. In either case, the Specks had not been prepared for the prisoners to turn on them with such fury.
The section of the fort that housed the prisoners had been constructed in such a way that the watchtower overlooked both the prisoners’ compound and the outer wall. I would later hear that some of the prisoners had doused the fires set near the watchtower while others had fought hand to hand with the Specks to hold the warriors back. Their valiant action had enabled their guards to organize themselves and retreat to the upper level of the watchtower. Flames leapt upon the roof of the tower; at least one of his fire-arrows had found its target. But the forces that held the watchtower were undeterred by the fire above them. From that vantage, their long guns were having a deadly effect upon the Specks. The open space around the watchtower was littered with bodies, many of them Speck. As we approached, it was obvious to me that the prisoners and their guards had joined forces, for gunfire came now from the lower level of the watchtower as well. As long as the defenders’ ammunition held out, the Specks had no hopes of taking the watchtower.
I knew that. Therefore Soldier’s Boy knew it also.
His Speck warriors did not seem to comprehend it. Even as we came onto the scene, a handful more brave than sensible rushed into the open, bows drawn, to launch their arrows at the high tower windows. Coming into the open was the only way for them to bring their weapons into effective range, yet the soldiers in the tower had only been waiting for them to do so. I heard the distant shout of “Fire!” and the bark of the long guns. Every one of the Specks went down. Four lay shuddering; only one crawled back toward the sheltering shadows. Another gun cracked and he, too, lay still. Soldier’s Boy’s whole body twitched as if the shot had entered him.
I had a moment of icy realization. If there was one good man in that tower, one sharpshooter, I was at the edge of his range. I could die at any moment now. Terror clawed at me from the inside as if I had swallowed a small beast with sharp claws. Still, I did not hesitate. I clenched myself around my fear and did not let it show. I did not warn him, but only breathed a prayer. Good god, let it happen now. Let this be over. I was sure that if Soldier’s Boy fell to a bullet, his followers would scatter.
The long guns in the tower flashed again; strangely, I do not recall that I heard them. Between the muzzle flash and the blows of the iron balls, I knew a thousand regrets for my life’s end, said a hundred farewells. To my left, a warrior crumpled, howling and clutching at his shattered knee. To my right, a man dropped without a sound. Before me, like a tiny hailstorm, the impact of bullets kicked up spurts of packed snow and ice. Was I hit? I waited for pain.
Soldier’s Boy did not. He jerked Clove’s big head around and kneed him at the same time. “Fall back!” I heard him shout, in Gernian, and then he cursed in the same language before crying, “Run! Get back—stay out of the open and the light! Get back!”
The fool had never thought to teach them how to retreat in an orderly fashion. In his arrogance, he’d never imagined that he’d need for them to know that. Now his careless order and his own apparent flight from the battle woke their fears, and the men who fled to follow him did so heedlessly. I heard another volley fired and screams behind me. Some of his warriors had not heeded his warning to stay out of the open in their haste to follow him away from danger.
At almost the same instant, I heard a sound that had never been sweeter in my ears. A trumpet sang, a call to arms. And miraculously, in the distance, from outside the fort, I heard another horn answer it, and then the heart-leaping sound as the same faraway instrument sounded a charge. Hope, all but dead in me a few minutes before, suddenly surged back to life. The first trumpet sounded again, within the fort, and it seemed much closer now. From the watchtower, I heard a resounding cheer. Then, a volley of bullets peppered the ground near us. A few, perhaps charged with an extra bit of powder or simply by luck, penetrated the shadows that hid us and found random targets. Three warriors howled in pain, and one abruptly fell, still.
“Follow me!” Soldier’s Boy shouted, and urged Clove into a trot. His warriors needed no urging. They ran alongside him. The leaping flames and the thick smoke that had been his allies earlier now seemed his enemy. He turned down one street, only to have a burning building suddenly sway and then collapse across his path in a searing whoosh of hot air and sparks. It was too much even for steady Clove. He half reared and whinnied in distress. Soldier’s Boy came shamefully close to falling off him before he mastered him and turned him aside from the wreckage. But now his warriors were in front of him in the darkness, blocking his path and milling in confusion. He had to force Clove through them, shouting, “Give way, give way!”
The trumpet sounded again while he was pushing his way through his own warriors. It was closer still. The fort seemed a labyrinth of buildings and streets to him, one made more confusing in that some of the streets that had been clear were now blocked with burning debris. He cursed and I sensed his rising dismay. Once he broke clear of his
followers, he called back to them, “We need to make for the gate. We must not be corralled inside the fort!” He pushed Clove into a trot again and once more his warriors fell in behind him. I could sense him seething with fury and impotence that he had no way of summoning his scattered force to him, no way to reach all of his warriors and tell them that he wanted them outside the walls of the fort rather than within.
We retreated through a nightmare. The fires had spread, just as he had planned. The streets were thick with smoke and fallen burning debris littered the road. There were bodies as well, mostly Gernian but some Speck, and once I glimpsed a mother holding a baby and clutching an older girl by the hand. When she saw us turn down the street toward her, she silently fled, pulling her child behind her. They ran down a narrow alley. When we passed it, they were out of sight, and no one gave chase to them. Soldier’s Boy was as intent now on getting his warriors out of the fort as he had been originally on getting into it.
Clove was equally willing to depart from this hellish place. My placid old mount fought his bit and jigged ponderously, longing to break from his heavy trot to a lope. Soldier’s Boy held him in, shouting to his warriors to keep up with him. He could have fled and left them there; I will give him that. He did not desert his men. It was not his fault that he had passed a crossroads when, from the shadows on his left, small-arms fire burst out, dropping the men immediately behind him. Clove, startled, leapt forward, while those who had seen the men in front of them fall fled backward, shouting. Soldier’s Boy hauled hard on Clove’s reins, turning the big horse and then kicking him after his fleeing warriors. He was fortunate that the hidden soldiers were recharging their weapons. Clove jigged and shied over the bodies in front of him before he left them behind and caught up with Soldier’s Boy’s force.
“Stay close to me! We must go a different way, to another gate,” he shouted to them. He glanced up at the sky, hoping to take his bearings from the stars. The rising smoke banished that hope. At the next intersection, he turned, randomly I suspect, and led his warriors on. This section of the town was mostly intact; these were the simpler homes and the less important buildings that had escaped his fires. I prayed that any folk in them would stay within and hidden, and that Soldier’s Boy would be too intent on fleeing to do them any harm. The light from the fires several streets away danced eerily in the windowpanes of the crouching houses. Either their occupants had fled or they huddled, lightless and silent, inside them. We saw no one, and no one barred our way.
The air grew clearer but the darkness deeper. Surrounded by fires earlier, no one had thought to bring a torch. Soldier Boy cursed his own stupidity and then, with a deep grunt of effort, summoned the magic. Light emanated from him. Probably I alone knew what it cost him to work such a charm in a settlement so thick with iron. Even the nails in the boards of the buildings we passed seemed to snag and tear at our magic as we hastened by them. The illumination he gave off enabled his followers to trail us, but did not light the way for him. I thought to myself that it made him an excellent target for anyone who might see him, but kept that thought small and to myself.
Another turn, and suddenly the gate was before us. It was open, and torches flanked it, beckoning us. I wondered that the sentries had not roused to the fires and trumpets. Perhaps they had, for I saw no sign of them. Freedom and escape beckoned us through the open mouth of the gate. It was the north gate, the most seldom used gate of the fort, the gate that we joked led to “nowhere.” Outside it, only a thin layer of town lay between us and the wastelands beyond. The north side of the fort was the least sheltered from the prevailing winds. Blown snow was always deepest there and the howl of the wind always the strongest. Only the poorest hovels were built on the north side of the fort, the homes of the widows and orphans of dead prisoners for the most part. Their huts were dark and unfired. The unimportance and uselessness of that population had saved them from the Specks’ attention. Shadow and concealment beckoned in the crooked streets. Relief bloomed in Soldier’s Boy heart. “To me!” he commanded his drained band, and kicked up Clove’s flagging trot.
Soldier’s Boy cleared the gate and a moment later, his warriors mobbed around him. They were clear of the fort’s confining walls. He glanced about himself, getting his bearings. He caught a tiny flash of light, a reflection of smoke-filtered moonlight on someone’s buckle. Years of Sergeant Duril’s drilling me paid off for him. He flung himself sideways off his horse, putting Clove’s bulk between him and the ambush, quenching his light as he fell. Muzzle-flash, the crack of explosion, and angry bees whizzing over him. Clove screamed as a projectile tore out a chunk of his neck. A wall of smoke rose up from the weapons and wafted up to join the smoke of the burning buildings. A stench of rotten eggs floated with it.
Behind him, warriors screamed. They had not seen that flash of buckle, had not dropped down to the earth to avoid the deadly hail. Instead it had cut through them, a scythe through standing grain. The warriors who remained standing were those who had been saved by the bodies of the men in front of them. On the ground in the dark, men squirmed and thrashed. Off to our right, I heard a familiar voice say, “First rank, recharge. Second rank, forward.”
Spink’s voice might have been reciting in a classroom, so devoid was it of emotion. Hadn’t he seen me? Had he failed to recognize me? Would I fall to the command of my best friend? I devoutly hoped so. Time had frozen in its tracks.
“Ready—”
“Scatter!” Soldier’s Boy bellowed to his troops. “Return to the rendezvous!” Those that could, did. He did not watch them go. Rather, with a display of strength and agility that was amply assisted by a surge of magic, he flung himself at Clove and swarmed up into the saddle again.
“Aim—”
He reined the big horse around, directly toward the ranked shooters, and kicked him hard. Startled, Clove surged forward. Before Spink could give the order to fire, we crashed into his front line. The firing line gave way before us, men leaping out of the way, some guns going off randomly. In the light of muzzle-flash, I had one glimpse of Spink’s horrified face. He stared up at me, eyes huge and betrayed. In the noise of the gunfire, I saw his mouth shape one heartbroken word: Nevare! He’d tracked me with his pistol. The muzzle of it was pointed dead at my chest. All he had to do was pull the trigger.
He did not.
And then Soldier’s Boy was through their lines and galloping down the dark side street. Even if he had wanted to, I don’t think he could have reined Clove in. The big horse had never been battle trained, and this night had been one long series of horrors for him. Given the chance to flee into the dark, he took it. Soldier’s Boy could only hope that the warriors who could retreat had done so. For those who lay dead or dying, he could do nothing. The thought of his wounded came to his mind, and too late, he wondered how they would be treated if captured. I answered that for him.
“Have you fired the houses of families? Will they find women and children with arrows in them or the marks of the sword upon them? If they do, they will be treated as we treat anyone who slaughters women and children.”
I think at that moment he wished to die just as much as I did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
RETREAT
As we fled through the dark streets, Soldier’s Boy listened for the sound of pursuit. There was none, though we heard scattered gunshots behind us. “They are killing those you left behind,” I told him brutally, even though I was not sure that was so. “They are shooting the wounded where they lie.” Spink would not have allowed such a brutality, if it came to him to give the command, but in times of battle, men follow first the commands of their own hearts, and sometimes their officers are too late to rein them in.
A winter dawn, gray and bleak, was seeping across the eastern sky. Smoke curtained it, but soon the light would break through. Time for all Specks to be gone, if the attack had gone as planned. Soldier’s Boy had been delayed too long in the maze of the fort. His men would not have the cover of night to
help them retreat. Neither would he. Clove had his head, the bit clamped in his teeth, and the big horse cared nothing for secrecy, only escape. He left the last of the scattered huts behind and galloped on over the wastelands. When he came to the end of the packed snow trail, Soldier’s Boy was finally able to pull him in. Clove pranced a few more steps, then abruptly halted, blowing and snorting. A long black streak of blood marked Clove’s sweaty neck. There was dried blood along his flank, too, an injury that Soldier’s Boy hadn’t noticed before. Heart thumping, lungs gasping, Soldier’s Boy looked back the way he had come and tried to think of his next move.
The red light of the flames was reflected in the smoke overhead, giving an odd orange cast to the day and to Gettys in particular. With the dawn came a wind. Ash and cinders rode it. Soldier’s Boy rubbed his sooty face, blinked, coughed, and turned Clove’s head toward the foothills. The big horse was tired now. Soldier’s Boy had to kick him to get him to move uphill through the unbroken snow. It offered them the closest cover. In the furrows and scrub brush of the foothills, Soldier’s Boy could become invisible while he worked his way back to the rendezvous. He was operating mindlessly now, not thinking of honor or victory or even defeat, but only the very practical question of how to live through the next ten minutes.
At the first substantial rise of ground, he pulled Clove in and looked back. Smoke was still climbing in tall columns from blackened ruins, and in half a dozen places flames still leapt strongly. The watchtower that overlooked the prison was burning well. High overhead, murders of crows coasted in on the wind. Above them and unmistakable even at that distance were the wide wings of the endlessly circling croaker birds. Always, the sounds of battle and the smoke of destruction brought such scavengers. They would not care if they feasted on Speck or Gernian or seared horsemeat. They’d all feed well on this disaster. He bared his teeth at them, full of hate, and then looked down again on the burning fort and town.
