Tagart found himself staring at the man, despite the need to leave the gatehouse and discover what losses had been inflicted on his own people. And at the back of his mind Tagart was trying to assess the chances of making a run for safety. The north-east gates, perhaps deliberately, had been left unguarded by the Flint Lord. It was as though he were inviting Tagart to try.
Tagart’s fighters were women as well as men, slaves as well as nomads, undisciplined, uncoordinated, lacking all training in warfare. Pitched against them were five hundred soldiers, awesomely well prepared and equipped. The odds were hopeless. But staying in the Trundle would be death. Before long, even more soldiers would arrive, from the outer forts. They would help the others to erect a temporary village and keep warm by burning timbers from the mines, and in a week, a month, supplies of food and water in the fort would run out. For a while those inside would eat snow and go hungry, but when the last dog had been eaten, they would start eating each other. The dead first, then the nearly dead, then the weakest of those left alive.
The Flint Lord knew it. He had come to the forefront of the ranks and stopped, alone. Behind him was the movement of his men, the bright fluctuation of the fires; but he was motionless. His stillness was uncanny, the product of an anger so deep and unforgiving that it wore the appearance of calm. At its centre was his gaze, fixed on the fort, on the gatehouse, on the open window, on the face and eyes and soul of his adversary.
Tagart took an unconscious step backwards and his heel touched the paper cone, which had fallen to the floor. It rolled aside with a resonant scrape, and Tagart, who minutes before had been eager to use it, to bargain his way out of the trap into which he had sucked all the nomad tribes, now felt himself unable even to bend and pick it up, still less put it to his lips and attempt to communicate with such a man.
Tagart made himself break the spell and look away. He had resolved to act, whatever the cost. He could no longer afford to wait for Bubeck: it was beginning to look as if Bubeck would never come.
Pushing back the conclusion of this thought, he glanced out again for a last glimpse of the man in grey.
He had disappeared. Something had drawn him back into the assembly. Tagart saw what it was.
Over to the right, climbing nearer through the thorn scrub on the western face of the hill, giving the Flint Lord complete superiority of numbers, was a column of a hundred and fifty men wearing the dark armour of the Vuchten.
In a daze Tagart left the gatehouse and went down to the enclosure.
* * *
There was a quality about the woman that preserved part of her dignity even now. Like the Flint Lord’s spotless and luxurious personal clothing, like the lavishness of his chambers and the costly contents of the chests and cupboards that had been looted by the slaves, she was of the best and most expensive kind: just the consort that a man like Brennis Gehan would take.
Her face was grimed and bruised, and she was holding the torn flap of her robe to her neck, both to keep herself distanced from Tagart and to cover the flesh that had been exposed when the slaves had tried to rape her.
She was exhibiting this rare pride, yet the manner in which she had been found, crouching in the bottom of an empty cistern, spoilt it all, and in her brown eyes it was easy to discern the terror of imminent death.
“Take her upstairs. Give her new clothes and a private room. Her own room.”
Fodich said, “The slaves want to kill her.”
“Keep them away. Keep them away from this building at least.”
Lookouts had been posted in the guard-towers and on the signal station, but still there had been no trace of Bubeck or any of his force. Half an hour had passed since the attack on the gates. The aspen trunk was still lying outside, surrounded by the bodies of twenty-eight Vuchten. They had been sacrificed, perhaps merely to establish whether or not the buttresses had been erected, and any further attempt to breach the fort before nightfall seemed now to have been abandoned.
Three nomads, including the man in the gatehouse, had died in the attack; several had sustained serious injury. They had been taken, with the rest of the wounded, to the barracks by the north-east gates, where women had been appointed to look after them.
The nomad chiefs were beginning to impose basic order. A handful of the most violent and uncontrollable slaves, most of whom had found beer or mead, had been bound hand and foot and locked in the prison.
Klay was alive; so was Segle. Tagart had been with her in the enclosure when word had come that the Flint Lord’s woman had been found hiding in the residence.
He watched the woman being escorted to the stairway. She, perhaps, was the reason for the reckless savagery of the attack on the gates. And perhaps her presence in the fort explained the terrible gaze that had held Tagart helpless at the gatehouse window. For the nomads she represented hope: she was the key to deliverance.
Then there were the other hostages. They would add to Tagart’s bargaining strength.
He left the day-room, Fodich at his side. It was already getting dark. Cloud had spread across the sky: more snow was on its way.
In the gatehouse, Tagart picked up the paper cone and went to the window. The scene on the hillside had changed little. Other tents had gone up, and men were bringing more timbers from the mines.
The fire by the Flint Lord’s tent was still burning.
“Brennis Gehan! Brennis Gehan!”
At first, as before, there was no reaction. Then a man came out of the tent. It was the Flint Lord.
“Lord Brennis! We have your wife! We have her! She’s alive!”
The Flint Lord seemed to be deaf. He turned and spoke to one of his soldiers.
“Lord Brennis! Lord Brennis! We have your lady! We have other hostages! Let us go and they will be spared! Lord Brennis! Give some sign that you hear! I am Shode, chief of the Waterfall tribe! We must talk!”
The Flint Lord had by now turned his back and was in earnest discussion with the soldier. The soldier pointed towards the mines and the Flint Lord nodded agreement. With that, he went back into his tent.
Tagart shouted until it was dark.
The tent-flap did not move again.
2
Hewzane, as General of the Coast, divided his time between the seven outer forts. In winter he travelled from one to another by dog-sledge, which, although considered indecorous, was quicker, safer, and capable of covering greater distances between rests than the usual slave-drawn sledge.
There were ten dogs in the team: sturdy, rough-haired animals bred for stamina and docility in harness. They pulled in a single long file, all but the leading dog wearing a withy muzzle, while Hewzane, seated in comfort under warm furs, flicked his whip and guided the light, elegant framework of the sledge in a path that left two endless lines in the snow. On each side ran a pair of bodyguards; a fifth man went ahead of the dogs.
For the period of the campaign against the savages, Hewzane had opted to remain at Eartham, the first fort to the east of Valdoe. The demands of the campaign would weaken the Trundle; Lord Brennis had agreed that Hewzane should be on hand.
Soon after observing Valdoe’s signals for Bow Hill, Hewzane had indeed been summoned to attend Lord Brennis and give advice, for Bow Hill was one of the outer forts and its defence the proper province of the General of the Coast.
On his way, Hewzane had seen with his own eyes the distress smoke coming from the Trundle. It had both alarmed and puzzled him, and, arriving among the soldiers on the hillside, he had been astonished to learn what had happened and to find Gehan in charge of a rash attempt to get back into the fort.
Gehan’s mood had been such that Hewzane had felt it better not to criticize. The attempt, predictably enough, had failed, whereupon Hewzane, after consultation with the senior officer of the Vuchten, had offered his assistance. Using timbers from the mines, work had begun on a toster, or protective roof, which would cover the men when next they used the battering-ram.
Among the survivors of th
e uprising had been the mines Trundleman, Blean, who had managed to hide in one of the galleries. Blean was an expert, if not a genius, in the craft of joinery, and his flair for improvisation made him ideal for the work in hand. Hewzane had left him in charge, and gone to sit with Lord Brennis in his tent.
Gehan was distracted with grief and rage. He sat holding his sister’s hand. She had been given a camp bed; her face, which Hewzane had formerly conceded to himself as pretty, even lovely, had been wiped clean of blood, leaving her complexion pale, blotched, and ugly. Her hair hung in damp strings. She fretted at her bandages, fidgeted continually, and was overcome by frequent fits of sobbing. As the day faded she grew quieter and more resigned and expressed a desire to sleep: Hewzane left the tent, to be followed shortly by his lord.
The Trundle, viewed for the first time from the outside by one denied access to it, seemed to Hewzane both magnificent and frightening. Set against the grey-blue of the snow at dusk, behind it the sweep of a louring sky, the dead weight of its walls and towers soaked up the last vestige of daylight and gave back nothing. Here and there, glimpsed through cracks in the palisade, were twinkles of firelight, but they served only to emphasize the oppressive bulk of the fort, this structure that had been built to dominate a foreign land and bring it under control.
That was the meaning of the word Gehan: control, continuing manipulation, exploitation. The Trundle, straddling Valdoe Hill, looking north to the vanquished land and south to the sea and the homelands, was the symbol and the embodiment of the Gehan name.
The soldiers had begun to settle the details of their comfort in this unexpected bivouac. What tents there were had been brought up from the mine-workings, from the wreckage of the slaves’ quarters and from the smoking ruins of the village. There were only enough tents for the officers, though, and no timber could be spared. As a result the men were even keener than their leaders to breach the gates. The alternative was a freezing night in the open, hard enough when on the march, but intolerable when warm barracks were only a bowshot away.
Meat, some of it already grimly roasted, had been brought from the village, and cauldrons and cooking utensils had been salvaged from the slaves’ kitchen and put to use, but there was not enough food to share among six hundred men, and Hewzane saw that many had already broken open their pack rations.
He removed, finger by finger, his kidskin gloves, and stood warming his hands at the fire. Beyond the flames, in the middle of the assembly, a space had been cleared for Blean and his carpenters, recruited from those soldiers who knew a little woodwork. With adzes and other tools from the mines, they had prepared the members of the toster and now tenons and mortises and halving joints were being cut and tested before fitting the framework together. When finished, the toster would be twenty yards long and three across, making a long, lightly pitched roof. Under it would be four files of men, to carry the battering ram and the toster itself.
Hewzane pulled on his gloves: Gehan had emerged from the tent.
“How much longer, Hewzane?”
“An hour or two. Perhaps more.”
Gehan looked exhausted. He had been chewing his lips. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes sunken, but Hewzane sensed that these personal and outward signs of distress had been occasioned solely by the harm done to Ika. As her brother, he was grieving and his anger was open. As Lord Brennis, the merciless extent of his rage had, by strength of will, been contained and kept ready for controlled use on those who had taken the fort. He had, it seemed, regained himself since the madness of the first attack on the gates.
“Come, Hewzane,” he said, and a way opened before them as they went to inspect the carpenters’ work.
* * *
“Tell me about him.”
“He is my husband.”
“And you are carrying his child?”
Her eyes dropped.
“Why doesn’t he care whether you live or die?”
She made no answer.
Tagart studied her face; she was softly spoken and he had to strain to catch her replies. Her body-slave, a motherly woman named Rian, seemed divided in loyalty between her mistress and the success of the rebellion. She had disclosed that Lady Brennis was pregnant, which made the Flint Lord’s behaviour even more difficult to understand.
Tagart had taken over the largest of the ground-floor rooms in the residence. Food had been brought and the lamps lit.
With the coming of night, he had shed the defeatism that had made his despair insufferable. The change had come suddenly. He had been talking to Correy, giving instructions for fires to be kindled and certain stores broached, when he realized that he had allowed himself to become diverted from his first aim. His experience in the gatehouse had unnerved him and made him less than himself, but now he was glad there had been no response to his shouts. He had been willing then to bargain with the Flint Lord, to exchange hostages for mere freedom, when what he truly sought was nothing less than the man’s death.
Once this had been secured – though Tagart as yet had devised no way of bringing it about – there would be time enough to worry about Bubeck and about getting the rest of the slaves and nomads safely away from the fort. Perhaps, with their leader dead, the soldiers would lose both their direction and their taste for fighting. He did not know. Nor did he know anything of the habits and temperament of the man he had decided to kill, and that was why he had sent for Lady Brennis.
She was sitting on a cushion, her hands in her lap, her legs tucked inside the voluminous folds of a finely woven robe, pink and grey, the narrow edging down one breast embroidered white on black in an abstract pattern of birds and grasses. A ribbon of the same design held back her hair.
“I am sorry if they hurt you,” Tagart said, and she looked up defensively. “You must understand what this means to them.”
Altheme said nothing. The bruises on her face were not serious. Only her composure seemed to have suffered, and she was doing her best to repair that. She had not deigned to ask Tagart who he was: she was trying, not very expertly, to give the impression that she regarded him, his questions, the rebellion, the whole upheaval of the Trundle, as impertinent vulgarities unworthy of her attention.
Tagart felt himself losing patience with her. He had never encountered such a woman before. She bewildered him; he was unable to guess at, still less pursue, the line of interrogation that would tell him what he wanted to know.
“If you do not talk we will have to torture you.”
She gave him a reproachful glance.
“In your place I would be worried,” he said.
“In your place I would die of self disgust.”
He stood up, exasperated, and went to the window. If she were his woman, in the woods, at the camp, he would soon get the information out of her. These foreigners evidently allowed their women abnormal licence: he could no more understand it than he could fully take in all the marvels of the Trundle and the Flint Lord’s residence. The paintings, the furniture, the simple fact that this was a shelter that went up in the air, the casual, easy mastery that was manifested in every incomprehensible joist and panel: it was all beyond him; he had no words for it.
Compared with this one room, the whole of his culture was clumsy and pathetic. And this woman was unlike any he had ever met. He tried to imagine her in the company of the Flint Lord, serene, languorous, amusing. And yet she was not a foreigner in appearance, for she was dark, like a nomad.
He put his hand on the window-frame. The shutters were open, and he could see past the gate of the inner enclosure to the battlements, where two big clay cauldrons were being heated on beds of glowing charcoal.
“Has he always lived here?” Tagart said, without turning round. “Or did he come from across the sea?”
“He was born in this house.”
An answer at last. “Has the Trundle ever been taken before?”
“Perhaps.”
“In his lifetime?”
“I have never heard of it.”
/> “Does he have another woman he likes better than you?”
“You are impudent as well as stupid.”
“Then tell me why he does not care if you are killed.”
“I see how little you know about the Gehans,” she said, with every appearance of pride, but he knew his question had touched a raw place. “If Lord Brennis himself were your prisoner his men would ignore your demands. If they did otherwise he would kill them himself at the first opportunity, just as he is going to kill you tonight when he breaks down the gates, you and —”
Tagart did not wait to hear any more. Correy had called his name from the gatehouse: the second attack was about to start. Tagart snatched up his stormcoat and, cramming his arms into the sleeves, ran outside into the newly falling snow.
* * *
Soon after dusk one of Irdon’s unit leaders, protected by a specially large shield, had tied the end of a long cable into a noose and dragged it to the aspen trunk. The savages had shot many arrows, at him and the cable, but he had retreated unharmed and the trunk had been safely and easily retrieved.
Gehan took a meal with Hewzane, Irdon, and a Vuchten commander, the senior man, named Speich.
Now in his late forties, Speich kept his ash-blond beard and hair closely shorn. In the presence of superiors he was studiously correct, and allowed no expression of disapproval or disagreement to escape his lacklustre, pale blue eyes. He had achieved renown among his men for his surgical, mechanical fairness: they feared and loved him in equal parts. He belonged to the “Garland”, the inner circle of high-ranking officers whose loyalty to the Home Lord was beyond question. For the duration of the Brennis campaign he had been given charge of the whole Vuchten force.
“It will be as my lord desires,” he said.
Persuaded by Hewzane, Gehan had decided to keep the Vuchten in reserve from now on and use ordinary soldiers to breach the fort. There was no possibility of failure: the toster would be effective, but there would perhaps be further casualties and the Vuchten would be better employed in rounding up and dealing with the enemy once the gates were down.
The Flint Lord Page 17
