The smoke had come. Bubeck had attacked the village and lured the soldiers down from the fort.
Tagart’s mouth was dry. He unfastened his axe from its sling, summoned a shout, and at a run led his people from the trees and onto the hill.
* * *
Coming down the track from the north-east gate, Gehan was appalled and fascinated to see that the brigands had now set fire to the Meeting House. Black billows were rolling from the roof and pouring into the compound, giving a hellish, other-worldly tinge to the scenes of murder and pillage being enacted from house to house. Dozens of other buildings were burning too. Both granaries, many of the workshops, the leather stores, four large barns, and at least a score of the best and most luxurious houses, among them those of the quartermaster, the roads Trundleman, and even the fine and stately residence of General Larr: all were ablaze. Flame had engulfed the three great ricks of firewood, sending intense heat downwind to melt the snow from long, oddly shaped tongues of grey mud. Steam was rising from the mud to add to the smoke and ash, climbing into and sullying the sky. The village had been turned into something unreal, fiercely set apart from the rest of the landscape.
As he descended towards it, Gehan heard its noise growing louder: the combined shrieks and yells of the brigands, the screams of the wounded, of the scorched and impaled, of those with their hair and clothes alight, the frantic squealing of pigs and goats and cattle trapped and burning in their stalls.
There were at least three hundred brigands. Such a large and audacious force had never been envisaged by those who had built the village, those who had decided that no palisade was necessary; and the delay between the alarm being given and the dispatch of help from the Trundle had allowed the fires to take firm hold. Where the brigands had come from, why they were attacking the village, why they had attacked Bow Hill: these were mysteries that Gehan and Larr had been given no time to discuss. A message had been sent immediately to Bow Hill, recalling all reinforcements. Larr had been left with fifty soldiers, the civilians, and command of the Trundle, for Gehan had decided, on an impulse compounded of anger and a need for action, to take personal charge of the defence of the village. Of the twenty-one units remaining in the Trundle he had chosen nineteen – four hundred and seventy-five men – and brought them at battle-pace out of the north-east gate.
Gehan was in the centre of the column, surrounded by his customary bodyguard of ten men. Behind him was one of the commanders, whom he had appointed as his lieutenant, a blond, spare-limbed man of thirty-five named Irdon.
At the bottom of the hill, three hundred yards from the Meeting House, Irdon shouted an order and the soldiers spread out across the rough, snow-crusted ground. In a few moments they had formed a huge half circle. All movement ceased.
“Spears!”
In exact unison they presented their spears, a long, curving rank of aligned and identical shafts, pointing inwards to the centre of the half circle – the village.
Some of the brigands had already run away. Others were following. The compound was littered with their abandoned spoils and with bodies, sprawled in grotesque attitudes or lying more or less normally, on the open snow, in burning doorways, on the steps of the Meeting House.
Irdon gave his instructions. The manoeuvre to be performed was a standard part of the soldiers’ training. They were to pursue the brigands from the village and onto Levin Down, which, having a diameter at the base of only half a mile, was small enough to be encircled, the gap between each man being seven yards at most, reducing continuously as they climbed and drove the enemy to their deaths at the top.
“Vuchten Red Unit: take six prisoners! Hunt the others to the death!”
Gehan and his bodyguard were left behind. He watched the chase, his view partly obscured by burning buildings and drifting smoke. The brigands, women as well as men, were fleeing in a mob, being herded by the soldiers towards the trees. On the far side of the compound was an arable field, its clods and withered stalks unevenly covered by snow. Beyond this, across a frozen brook, many of the brigands had already reached the edge of the woods, which rose almost without a break up the steep scarp of Levin Down.
“My lord,” said the leader of the bodyguards. “They’ve got a fire up there.”
It was so. White smoke was rising from the top of the hill. A camp? Some sort of signal? Gehan could not tell. This was another mystery that the six prisoners would explain.
The uneven surface of the field had delayed a few of the brigands; one had twisted his ankle and fallen. The soldiers killed him where he lay and ran on. At the brook three Vuchten had caught up with and speared a pair of women. Yet more soldiers were spreading along the base of the hill and disappearing into the woods.
Keeping well clear of the worst fires, Gehan walked into the village to look at the damage. Larr’s house had been reduced to a stark framework of charcoal spars bathed in racing flame. The wood had burned away in cracked patterns, leaving rows of squares and oblongs, like runes which were continually visited and abandoned by the caresses of the fire; even as Gehan paused to watch, the key beam gave way and the structure collapsed into the blackened rubble of stone and ash which had been rooms, bedding, clothes, the furniture of Larr’s domestic life.
There were no bodies to be seen here, but in the next house, also burning, he saw two dark shapes with spindled limbs and heads, shrunken as if by tremendous age. It seemed that most of the younger and more agile villagers had managed to escape, for the infirm and old accounted for a disproportionate number of those lying dead or pleading for help.
“Do something for that man,” he told one of the guards, and walked on, until he reached the eastern edge of the compound, farthest from the cries of the wounded and of the trapped beasts. Smoke was pouring overhead in great surges, as if generated behind him by the sound of the fire. He looked out across the fields. The chase had by now passed entirely into the woods, and from the slope above him and to his left could be heard, faintly but regularly, the shouts of the soldiers keeping contact. It would not be much longer before the brigands were brought to the top.
Hazy smoke under the morning sun spread thin, moving shadows over the flat fields in the valley ahead of him, fields bisected by a winding track which eventually joined the road to the north – along which his troops had that morning passed and repassed. Gehan wondered whether the six units of Vuchten, recalled by runners, had yet returned to the Trundle.
On his right, on the south side of the valley, rose the fields that had been made of the face of Valdoe Hill, and above them, where the ground was impoverished or the gradient too great, was the scrub of tussock grass and thorn that reached all the way up to the fort.
Casually his eye took in the distant form of the Trundle, black against the whiteness of the hill: the timbers of the palisade and guard-towers, the jutting framework of the north-east gatehouse; he even looked away again before realizing that something was amiss. At a mile’s range it was not immediately obvious that the pennons had been struck and replaced with strips of sheepskin, nor was it easy to see the continuous, white plume of distress that was rising from the signal station.
It was being carried strongly eastward by the wind at the summit, quickly evanescing, becoming one with the sky, and though it left no trace of haze it was being blown by the same impulses as the smoke from the ruined village down here in the valley, keeping company with it as it moved towards the forest and disappeared.
The Trundle was being attacked.
* * *
Klay saw the blonde woman run into the hawk mews. He broke away from the fighting and followed her.
He reached the door and barred it behind him. The uproar in the enclosure outside had upset the birds: the owls, falcons, hawks and eagles. With piercing screams they were treading their perches; the more highly strung had already bated and were hanging head downwards with wings and tail in a broken tangle.
Klay looked round. The far wall was divided into alcoves by wooden partitio
ns from floor to ceiling. Each alcove held three padded perches at chest height, above which were shelves laden with boxes, bags, tackle, bundles of twine and cloth and leather. Below the perches were lockers. They were too small for her to hide in.
His heart was thumping. He had lost all sense of time. He felt elated, drunk on the blur of events. At the mines he remembered spearing two men at least, seeing their faces, and in the fighting by the south-west gate he had taken three more.
Tagart’s plan had succeeded. The nomads had stormed the hill and cut down all the soldiers and overseers at the mines; the miners had come above ground as Klay had arranged, already armed with shovels and picks and lengths of wood. The slaves’ quarters had been broken open and everyone there set free. Klay had been in the middle of the throng of slaves and nomads heaving against the ranks of oak logs that made up the gates. Almost at once, the gates had opened inwards, released from inside by the slaves in the Trundle, and the crowd had surged forward and into the enclosure.
At the start of the rebellion, when the signal from Levin Down had been seen, there had been about fifty soldiers and thirty civilians in the Trundle. The civilians were craftsmen and freemen and overseers in the various workshops and buildings in the enclosure; working with them had been about forty slaves. When the smoke had come these slaves had attacked their overseers. Many of the other civilians had tried to run and hide, and the soldiers had been divided between fighting the slaves and making the fort secure – for they had already seen Tagart’s force advancing up the hill and towards the mine workings.
Once the gates had been opened, the few soldiers remaining in the guard-towers and on the battlements had been pulled down and put to death; Klay had been among the fighting there. Other slaves and many nomads had already spread out across the enclosure, rampaging through the sheds and buildings in their search for overseers or soldiers left alive. Tagart and a group of warriors had broken into the inner enclosure with ropes and grapnels, looking for the Flint Lord; it had been then that Klay had seen the woman, running towards the hawk mews. Somehow she had been flushed out of the inner enclosure. She was barefoot, wearing a thin white dress. And now she was somewhere in this building.
Klay noticed for the first time that he had been gashed in his right forearm. Spots of blood fell to the flagged stone floor as he passed from the hawk mews and came to the next room, a seven-sided chamber with a high, raftered ceiling. In the middle of the room, surrounded by a tier of seats, was what he took to be a cooking-pot or cauldron, a stone bowl on three legs, covered by a circular lid upon which was arranged a curious tripod of three bone needles.
He listened. Behind him was the screaming of the hawks, and outside, fainter now, deadened by the walls, he could hear human screams above the shouting of the slaves.
Klay’s eyes jerked to the left. The wall there was covered by a curtain of dense woven stuff, yellow and white and black, hanging by a line of horn rings from a carved wooden pole. He had heard something: a moan, a low and involuntary whimper of fear.
He ripped the curtain aside. She was there, crouching in a niche, making herself as small as she could, tightly clasping her shins, her blonde head bent low to show the nape of her neck.
He had not been mistaken. This was the same woman, the one in the village, the one who had encouraged the green-eyed youth … Klay’s hand trembled as he reached out his middle finger and allowed a drop of blood to splash on her neck. Her shoulders squirmed and she whimpered again, unable to deny to herself any longer that he was there.
Klay grasped her wrist and dragged her from the niche. She made no resistance and allowed herself to be pulled across the floor to the stone cauldron.
“I have jewels,” she said, barely able to speak.
Still holding her wrist, made slippery by his own blood, Klay reached out and took one of the bone needles from the tripod. With a dry rattle the other two fell to the stone surface of the lid.
“Look at me,” he said.
“I’ll give you anything —”
“Look at me!”
She turned her head and raised her eyes. They were blue: foreign eyes, cold eyes, the eyes of the farmers and the land across the channel.
“I am going to keep you in this room and lock the door,” Klay said. “I will visit you every day until you die. Until then, I want you to remember my face.” He gripped the bone needle and began to raise it. “Remember me well. Mine is the last face you will ever see.”
9
He had gone.
Ika felt the coldness of the stone floor against her shoulders and knew that at last she had become still. She had taken her hands from her face and she was silent, even though it had seemed impossible, in the worst moments when she had confirmed with her fingers what had been done to her eyes, that her screaming could ever stop. And yet it seemed not to have stopped. It was continuing somewhere, somewhere else, somewhere beyond …
She was blind. She had been blinded. With a brutal hand clenched in her hair he had wrenched back her head and put out her eyes. She knew what had happened, and yet she refused to accept it. Nothing was permanent. Her eyes would heal. She could see something even now: the blackness that surrounded her was not complete. It was tinged with colour. Red, it was tinged with red, almost as if that were the colour of pain itself.
And as if to ward off the weight that was threatening to crush her into the floor she sat bolt upright, her hands came to her face and she was screaming again.
He had said that he would be coming back. The slaves had taken possession of the fort and he would come back day after day with new tortures until she was dead. But worse than that, she was already robbed for ever of her sight and her face and fingers were sticky with blood and everyone had been murdered and even Gehan could not help her because she was alone in this excruciating darkness where there was only Rald’s voice and someone shaking her shoulders, shaking and shaking, hurting her, slapping her face, and to make it stop she cried out and was no longer screaming.
“Get up! Get up!”
“Who is it? Rald?”
“We must get out before they seal the gates!”
“Rald?”
He had helped her to her feet and they were leaving the divination chamber and coming into the hawk mews, into the banshee screaming of the birds, the screaming that she had thought might be her own.
“Rald! Where are you?”
“Here, my lady.” He touched her arm. “We must cover your robe or they’ll see you. At first they went mad. General Larr is dead, and all the soldiers and overseers. But now they’re taking hostages.”
“Are they in the residence yet?”
“Yes. Quickly, my lady.”
He had found some coarse, musty cloth among the falconers’ lockers. She allowed him to drape it over her shoulders. He led her towards the door.
“I was nearly killed myself,” he said. “The others hate me. I was searching for you, my lady. Then I saw him coming out of the hawk mews.” He guided her to the left. Cold air and a change in sound told her they had left the doorway. “Now we must be careful. Say nothing. Walk slowly as though your legs are hurt and I am helping you towards the barracks. That’s where they’re taking their injured.”
Rald was keeping close to the line of workshops, making for the north-east gates. The slaves had opened these too, though it had been on the far side of the enclosure, at the south-west gates, that the worst of the fighting had taken place. Ika could hear voices, both near by and far away, but the frenzy of the initial onslaught was over, and where there had been horrible cries of suffering there were now coarse shouts and even laughter. On her right, from the middle of the enclosure, came sounds of destruction. They were ransacking the Trundlemen’s quarters and the Flint Lord’s residence.
“The gates are still open,” Rald whispered. “Not much further.”
The pain in Ika’s eyes had started growing.
“I can’t go on …”
“You must.”
To be challenged now, as she was certain they would, to be taken and killed before they reached the gates, would be a kind of release: for she had thought that the first pain, soon after he had stabbed her, was the worst that could be imagined; but it had been a mere prelude to the remorseless, solid growth that was spreading into her skull from the unendurable points that had been her eyes.
“I can’t, Rald. I can’t.”
His hold on her arm tightened. “We’re coming to the gates now.”
She could scarcely understand him. Her feet slipped on the ice and she staggered, but Rald was supporting her and would not let her fall.
“We’re through! Keep walking! We’re through!”
Distantly she heard him speaking again. She was nearly unconscious and could recognize meaning only in the eager tone of his voice. Groping to comprehend, she retrieved the word Vuchten, sensed that it meant safety, salvation, vengeance; and then the rest of his words pierced her mind and before she collapsed she knew that he had said:
“Lord Brennis is coming.”
* * *
It had gone wrong. The rebellion had worked, and Klay had done his part, but the rest of the plan was in ruins. Once inside the Trundle, the slaves and nomads had been impossible to control. Even people from Tagart’s own tribe had ignored his orders and joined in the massacre of soldiers and civilians. The whole structure of his carefully thought scheme to find and destroy the Flint Lord was on the verge of being swept away. He had arranged for a systematic search of the fort to be carried out: it had not been done. He had arranged for the north-east gates to be kept sealed: they had been opened and left unguarded, as had the south-west gates. And now, unless the Flint Lord was up here, hiding on the roof of his own residence, Tagart would have to face the fact that his quarry had escaped and that he had thrown away scores of lives for nothing.
The door to the roof had been locked from the outside. It was at the top of a steep staircase which, dark and cramped, rose from the landing connecting the bedchambers. Fodich had ripped a length of rail from the wall downstairs, but there was not enough room to use it to lever off the hinges, nor could two men stand side by side to break the door down. The angle of the stairs prevented the use of some heavy article of furniture as a battering-ram. They had tried to split the panels with stone hammers and failed. Now Fodich was hacking at the hinges with a felling axe.
The Flint Lord Page 15
