A rider was jabbing down into the main ditch with his lance. Yulan darted in and cut the man’s thigh open; then, when he tried to wheel his horse about, killed him with a thrust under his armour and into his belly.
A great blow to Yulan’s back knocked him flat. He half rose, but glimpsed stamping hoofs coming for him, and instead scrambled and threw himself forward into the great ditch. In the few moments it took him to shake off the dazing impact, and to get to his feet, the struggle was all but done. Fewer than ten of Callotec’s lancers were galloping away, along the path and over the fields. Back towards the Old Threetower Road. Arrows sighed after them.
Yulan glanced up to the high ground, to the Kingshouse. Those outriding watchers were gone. They had done the wise thing, the disciplined thing, and left the battle to decide itself while they hastened back to their master with word of what was happening. Around the freshly dug pits, villagers were gathered, stabbing down with spears and pitchforks to kill wounded men and horses. Yulan saw Drann amongst them. Creel’s contract-holder was not taking part in the killing. He just stood there, spear in limp hand, watching. He looked bewildered. Each time there was a scream, or a yearning groan from the wounded or dying, he winced as if pin-stuck.
Yulan had no time to worry about Drann, though. At his feet, in the bottom of the ditch, one of his own men – one of those two lancers he had hidden here – was dead. The stub of a broken lance transfixed him. It had gone in above the collarbone, driven right through him to emerge from his lower back. Yulan bent down and pressed his eyes closed. He tried to lift his chin to shut his open mouth, but the dead muscle and bone resisted.
Yulan climbed from the ditch and stood on the track. He wiped each side of his sword across his trouser leg and sheathed it. He walked slowly back into the village. One of the menfolk lay dead. His head had been crushed by the stamp of a horse, by the look of him. The long-bladed knife he had brought to the battle lay on the ground, just beyond the reach of his stretched arm.
Rudran’s great horse set itself between Yulan and the sun, sinking him into shadow. He looked up at the ruddy-faced lancer.
“How did you do?”
“Merelick died in the ditch.” Rudran said it without accusation, or sorrow, or regret. It was a mere fact, to be conveyed to his commander.
“I saw,” Yulan nodded.
“I’ve another got a broken arm and ankle. He’ll not be doing any more fighting.”
“Bind him up and have someone take him after the villagers who went off into hiding,” Yulan said. “Get the rest of your men together. Hide them in one of the barns, if you can.”
Rudran went without hesitation to do as he was bid. He was not as cold as he could appear, Yulan knew. The gruff restraint with which he conducted himself was his way of excelling at his calling. But already Rudran had lost a fourth part of the few men he had brought out from Sussadar at Yulan’s command. Potent feelings would be roiling within the big man, waiting for the time he let them out.
Drann and the villagers were trying to pull dead men out of the pits that had trapped and killed them.
“Leave them be,” Yulan called over. “Any lamp oil in the village, any firewater or pitch, throw it in there over them. As much as you can find. Quickly.”
He did not wait to see his orders enacted. Hamdan was slithering down from one of the cottage roofs.
“That was better than it might have been,” the archer grunted.
“Lebid did well.”
“Told you he could be trusted for the task,” Hamdan smiled. “How long do you think before the rest of them are running down our throats?”
“Oh, not long enough. And I doubt they’ll come running. Callotec’s not foolish enough for that. Now he knows we’re here, he’ll come careful and crafty.”
“Well, that’s what we need, isn’t it? If we’re hoping that Akrana’s going to come and save us, we need Callotec going slow.”
“We do. Just a pity that that means he’ll not be making many mistakes. These lancers were the easy part. It’s uphill from here. Steep, at that.”
34
The Store Of Time
Drann was not sure whether or not he had killed a man. He had stood there, jostling amongst the eager villagers, and stabbed down into the pit with his spear. There had been men and horses down there, trying to rise. He had felt his spear strike something, but in the confusion he could not tell what flesh it was he had pierced.
The feel of it, that impact shaking up the shaft of the spear and into his hands, had in an instant extinguished the fire in his breast. Snuffed it out. Taken him back with wrenching force to the chaos and confusion of the knoll where he had fought alongside Creel. Some foolish part of him must have somehow expected this to be different. It was not. It was worse. He pulled away from the crowd, barely able to see. Stood there still holding his spear but not feeling its weight. He heard men crying out, and felt his face react to the sound, but he was so distant, so numbed, that he did not know what it did.
It was all over quickly. Bodies lying around him. Dead and wounded horses. The smell of blood and bowel. The villagers started trying to pull corpses up out of the trenches they had dug just hours before. To loot them of anything of value, Drann supposed, and did not know what to make of that.
“Leave them be,” he heard Yulan shouting from somewhere. “Any lamp oil in the village, any firewater or pitch, throw it in there over them. As much as you can find. Quickly.”
Absurdly, ridiculously, the villagers stopped what they were doing and looked questioningly to Drann. Turn away, he wanted to say. Turn to someone else. I’m just like you.
“Do as he says,” he muttered dully instead.
He went with them to scour the village for any liquid that might burn, because to be doing something was better than to be standing doing nothing amidst the dead. He carried flasks of oil back to the pits and spilled their contents over the corpses.
When it was done, he fled. He did not want to be seen, or spoken to, so he went to a well at the edge of the village and drew up water from it. He tipped handfuls of the cold, fresh liquid down his throat. His hands were trembling, he noticed. The water spilled over his chin, down his neck. When he could drink no more, he sat with his back against the hard stone of the well and closed his eyes. Confused and distracted as his mind was, he felt sleep reaching for him.
He was not given the time he craved.
“Here they come,” he heard someone shouting, when it seemed to him he had barely sat down, barely shut those tired eyes.
He stretched out his hand for his spear.
Yulan and Hamdan climbed together on to the roof of a hut and stood there watching as Callotec’s column came slowly and carefully around the furthest turn in the road and advanced upon the village. There was no point to concealment now. Callotec knew where they were, who they were.
And because he knew who they were, the last of the Hommetics was taking care. His little army drew itself up just out of bowshot, beyond the edge of the village’s fields, on the flat ground by the road.
No more than two hundred, Yulan judged. A great many fewer horsemen than before, for which he was grateful, but still more than the Free had. Loose lines of levymen. More ordered ranks of Armsmen and a few of Kasuman’s rebel Clade followers. Only one wagon now. That and the mules halted behind the lines of warriors. Beside the very tree under which Lebid had sat.
“Well, don’t they look pretty,” murmured Hamdan.
Two men rode out from the ranks and went charging, at the fullest of gallops, along the road. Yulan cocked his head on one side and watched them go.
“Going to see if we know how to make a barricade, I suppose.” he said.
“Looks so,” Hamdan agreed.
The two horsemen kicked up plumes of dust as they raced over uncobbled stretches. They were leaning forward, their heads pushed down on the far side of their mounts’ necks. Hamdan glanced down, tapped at the roof with one foot, shuffled the other aroun
d a little bit to get a sure footing.
The riders were almost at the bottom of the escarpment, almost at the barrier thrown across the rise of the road. They slowed, straightened, and turned their horses about.
“Show Callotec your reach,” Yulan said quietly.
“Happy to.”
The arrow was nocked in an instant, the bowstring pulled taut. And held there. Yulan could tell that Hamdan had stopped breathing. The archer tracked the movement of the Armsmen as they began to pick up pace, heading back towards their comrades. At what felt like the last instant before they would be beyond the reach of even a master archer, the arrow was away, singing its soft song as it curved up and down. Hamdan lowered the bow.
“That’s one of them,” he said quietly. “You want the other?”
As he finished the question, the arrow struck the lead rider in the side, just above his hip. He jerked upright, and his horse slowed. He gripped the arrow’s shaft even as his companion rushed past him and away.
“Oh, don’t pull it out, you fool,” muttered Hamdan.
But the Armsman did, and they heard him cry out even from that distance.
“Fool,” Hamdan said again, as they watched him ride back to Callotec’s company. He was slumping in the saddle, bending over the wound in his flank.
“Let’s get down,” Yulan said.
They slid to the edge of the roof on their backsides, and dropped to the ground. Hamdan unstrung his bow and slipped it back into the quiver on his back.
“Listen,” Yulan said. “There’s all sorts of ways this goes bad if it wants, but the quickest and the worst of them is Clevers. We don’t know how many Callotec’s got left with him, or what they might be able to do with the Bereaved if they’re there. So I’ve got nothing for you to do now but find them and kill them. However you like, however you can.”
“See a Clever, kill a Clever,” smiled Hamdan. “Seems clear enough.”
Drann waited with the villagers. He had somehow found himself amongst them, not the Free, and they had somehow found themselves convinced of his place there.
Drann looked at them and saw himself. They looked at him and saw… something else. He had done nothing to earn that look in their eyes, said almost nothing to any one of them. Yet they knew he had come here with the Free, and that was enough. He felt like a liar.
They huddled in the doorway of the barn in which they had earlier hidden themselves. The doors were wide open and tied back now. They were not hiding. Nor did they make any great show of strength. There were only about twenty of them left. One had already died fighting Callotec’s lancers; more had slipped away as soon as that skirmish was done, not liking that taste of the greater struggle to come. Drann understood that. He could easily have slipped away with them.
Looking from face to face now, he recognised his own fear and inner distress. Their eyes danced nervously around, not knowing where to settle their gaze.
“If we don’t fight them, you lose your homes, everything that’s here,” he said quietly, because he felt that something – anything – should be said. He was startled by the way every gaze was instantly turned upon him. Rapt attention, the like of which he had not attracted before.
“And if you lose your village to them, those men out there’ – he jabbed his chin in the vague direction of Callotec’s lines – “they’re going to go on from here and betray us all to the Orphans, and they don’t care what that means. They’ll watch all of us, all of you, killed and staked and enslaved, and they’ll not shed a tear for it because they think it’ll get them what they want.”
He could not tell whether his words had any effect, but his voice did strengthen as he spoke. He found himself believing them, even if no one else did.
Yulan watched as Callotec sent one party up to search the Kingshouse. Another went on to the high grounds to the south. Trying to sniff out any surprises. That was fine. It ate up the minutes, and Callotec hopefully did not understand what risks he ran in spending the store of time he held. In all likelihood, he thought Yulan had the Clamour waiting for him here in the village. Had he known the truth, that the Clamour was coming, somewhere out there in the rough land, there would have been none of this waiting and searching and taking measure.
Clouds drifted over. Vultures and crows, called by the scent of those already dead, came low over the village. Some settled in the fruit trees a short way beyond its outer bounds. Some circled. One – a small but viciously hook-beaked pale vulture – settled on a rooftop. Yulan, leaning in the doorway of the hut across the track, watched it. He debated, then kicked a pebble loose from the hard ground at his feet and picked it up. He bounced the pebble off the roof right next to the vulture, and it clambered clumsily into the air once more. He had been trying to hit it, but his throwing arm was not the best.
“Not your time yet,” he muttered under his breath.
There was no high ground within an arrow’s reach of the village save the looming heights of the escarpment rising behind it, which were thankfully inaccessible to the Hommetics. Thus restricted, when Callotec decided to test the mood he was reduced to sending a dozen or so of his bowmen scampering forward across the open fields. They went from ditch to ditch, bush to bush, trying to lose themselves in the tallest of the crops.
Yulan pinched finger and thumb between his lips and gave a couple of sharp whistles. Nothing came of them at first, but that did not trouble him. Hamdan’s men knew their work and did not need Yulan rushing them.
He lost sight of Callotec’s approaching archers and guessed they thought they had found the range and gone to ground while they readied themselves. Sure enough, a moment later a solitary arrow came looping up out of a field of grain. A black speck that lengthened as it rose and fell towards the village, landing just a few paces short of the outer ditch.
Before it did land, three more of its kind were in the air. Coming not from the fields but from amongst the cottages there at the village’s edge. Answering the challenge. They traced back that first arrow’s path, and plunged down through the very air it had climbed. A loose flock of shafts rattled amongst the cottages. Again they were answered by those more precise, more perfectly aimed. This time, there was a cry from out there in the crops. That got Hamdan’s archers excited. They always drew encouragement from any reward their labours won.
Arrows flashed out from the village, one after another after another. Each man, hidden in whatever shadow he was, behind whatever barrel, loosed as fast as the drumbeat of his rhythm allowed. That was too much for those in the fields. Yulan watched them scurrying back towards safety, crouched almost double but more interested in haste than concealment this time. Only seven of them, Yulan was pleased to note, and one of those limping badly.
He could see Callotec himself riding up and down the lines of his men, gesticulating. A body of perhaps forty of them – levy, with a handful of Armsmen to lead them – began trotting away. They worked around the furthest edge of the fields, moving to settle perhaps halfway between Towers’ Shadow and the low hill on which the Kingshouse stood. Another group, of similar size, skirted the village’s other flank, making for a young, shrubby orchard. That took them, just, close enough to tempt a few arrows out. One of them even found its mark. But then the levymen were amongst the bushes, and safe for now.
Three prongs to the fork, Yulan mused. The sharpest of them would be the one to the fore, since the two on either side were mostly levy. Callotec had kept the best of his company by his side, out there on the road.
He ran back from his post, keeping close to the houses. He found Rudran and his few remaining men sitting patiently on their horses in one of the barns. They were passing out dry, floury biscuits. Yulan took one himself when it was offered, though it would probably wake rather than blunt his hunger.
“They mean to come from three sides,” he told Rudran between bites. “Won’t bode well if they can tie the knot, so we’ll need to throw them off. There’s around forty of them out between here and the Kin
gshouse, set to come in that way. Levy. Can’t have them reaching the village. You give me that, and I’ll do what I can about the other two.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Rudran grunted.
Which was not true, and they both knew it, without Kerig to fortify them or their mounts.
“When you’re done with them, I’d appreciate it if you could come back round and lend a hand with those marching straight up the track and down our gullets,” Yulan said.
“All right,” said Rudran.
Drann had always imagined battles to be urgent, frantic affairs. Not a moment to draw breath or order thoughts. He rather wished that had turned out to be true, but it seemed that now nobody was in a hurry to fight.
Sitting by the doorway of the barn, his view was obscured. Although he could tell that something was happening, because he glimpsed distant movement out beyond the fields and because he saw Yulan running with some message for Rudran’s lancers, he had no clear idea of what it was. Callotec was encircling the village perhaps. That could hardly be anything other than bad.
Yet after that flurry of activity, nothing happened. Some of the villagers set aside their makeshift weapons and lay down in the hay of the barn. Drann wondered if he was supposed to prevent that. His own eyes were heavy, though. He had grown so accustomed to exhaustion and shortage of sleep that his guard was down. He rested his head against the frame of the barn door. Encircled his knees with his arms and interlaced his fingers. It was just warm enough, he thought dreamily. Any colder and he would need a blanket. He slept.
And was shaken awake, an unknown time later, by one of the villagers. The man had such a tight grip of Drann’s upper arm it hurt. He hissed into his ear: “They’re coming.”
The Free Page 30
