Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

by K. J. Parker

  He froze. In the long and glorious history of the Merebarton butts, only two possibles had ever been shot: one by a legendary figure called Old Shan, who may or may not have existed some time a hundred years ago, and one by Teucer’s great-uncle Ree, who’d been a regular and served with Calojan. Nobody had had the heart to pull the arrows out of that target; it had stayed on the far right of the butts for twenty years, until the straw was completely rotten, and the rusty heads had fallen out into the nettles. Every good archer had shot a fifty. One or two in the village had shot fifty with eight or fifty with nine. A possible—fifty with ten, ten shots in the inner circle of the gold—was something completely different.

  People were looking at him, and then at his target, and the line had gone quiet. A possible at one hundred yards is—well, possible; but extremely unlikely, because there’s only just enough space in the inner ring for ten arrowheads. Usually what happens is that you drop in seven, maybe eight, and then the next one touches the stem of an arrow already in place on its way in and gets deflected; a quarter-inch into the outer gold if you’re lucky, all the way out of the target and into the nettles if you’re not. In a match, with beer or a chicken riding on it, the latter possibility tends to persuade the realistic competitor to shade his next shot just a little, to drop it safely into the outer gold and avoid the risk of a match-losing score-nought. Nobody in history anywhere had ever shot a possible in a match. But this was practice, nothing to play for except eternal glory, the chance for his name to be remembered a hundred years after his death; he had no option but to try for it. He squinted against the evening light, trying to figure out the lie of his eight shots, but the target was a hundred yards away: all he could see of the arrows was the yellow blaze of the fletchings. He considered calling hold, stopping the shoot while he walked up the range and took a closer look. That was allowed, even in a match, but to do so would be to acknowledge that he was trying for a possible, so that when he failed—

  A voice in his head, which he’d never heard before, said quite clearly, go and look. No, I can’t, he thought, and the voice didn’t argue. Quite. Only an idiot argues with himself. Go and look. He took a deep breath and said, “Hold.”

  It came out loud, high and squeaky, but nobody laughed; instead, they laid their bows down on the grass and took a step back. Dead silence. Men he’d known all his life. Then, as he took his first stride up the range, someone whose voice he couldn’t identify said, “Go on, Teuce.” It was said like a prayer, as though addressed to a god—please send rain, please let my father get well. They believed in him. It made his stomach turn and his face go cold. He walked up the range as if to the gallows.

  When he got there: not good. The marker (Pilad’s uncle Sen; a quiet man, but they’d always got on well) gave him a look that said sorry, son, then turned away. Six arrows were grouped tight in the exact centre of the inner gold, one so close to the others that the shaft was actually flexed; God only knew how it had gone in true. The seventh was out centre-right, just cutting the line. The eighth was in clean, but high left. That meant he had to shoot two arrows into the bottom centre, into a half-moon about the size of his thumb, from a hundred yards away. He stared at it. Can’t be done. It was, no pun intended, impossible.

  Pilad’s uncle Sen gave him a wan smile and said, “Good luck.” He nodded, turned away and started back down the range.

  Sen’s nephew Pilad was his best friend, something he’d never quite been able to understand. Pilad was, beyond question, the glory of Merebarton. Not yet nineteen (he was three weeks older than Teucer) he was already the best stockman, the best reaper and mower, champion ploughman, best thatcher and hedge-layer; six feet tall, black-haired and brown-eyed, the only possible topic of conversation when three girls met, undisputed champion horse-breaker and second-best archer. And now consider Teucer, his best friend; shorter, ordinary-looking, awkward with girls, a good worker but a bit slow, you’d have trouble remembering him ten minutes after you’d met him, and the only man living to have shot a hundred-yard possible on Merebarton range—

  He stopped, halfway between butts and firing point, and laughed. The hell with it, he thought.

  Pilad was shooting second detail, so he was standing behind the line, in with a bunch of other fellows. As Teucer walked up, he noticed that Pilad was looking away, standing behind someone’s shoulder, trying to make himself inconspicuous. Teucer reached the line, turned and faced the target; like the time he’d had to go and bring in the old white bull, and it had stood there glaring at him with mad eyes, daring him to take one more step. Even now he had no idea where the courage had come from that day; he’d opened the gate and gone in, a long stride directly towards certain death; on that day, the bull had come quietly, gentle as a lamb while he put the halter on, walking to heel like a good dog. Maybe, Teucer thought, when I was born Skyfather allotted me a certain number of good moments, five or six, maybe, to last me my whole life. If so, let this be one of them.

  Someone handed him his bow. His fingers closed round it, and the feel of it was like coming home. He reached for the ninth arrow, stuck point first into the ground. He wasn’t aware of nocking it, but it got on to the string somehow. Just look at the target: that voice again, and he didn’t yet know it well enough to decide whether or not it could be trusted. He drew, and he was looking straight down the arrow at a white circle on a black background. Just look at the target. He held on it for three heartbeats, and then the arrow left him.

  Dead silence, for the impossibly long time it took for the arrow to get there. Pilad’s uncle Sen walked to the target with his armful of flags, picked one out and lifted it. Behind Teucer, someone let out a yell they must’ve heard back in the village.

  Well, he thought, that’s forty-five with nine; good score, enough to win most matches. And still one shot in hand. Let’s see what we can do.

  The draw. He had a lovely draw. This time, he made himself enjoy it. To draw a hundred-pound bow, you first use and then abuse nearly every muscle and every joint in your body. There’s a turning point, a hinge, where the force of the arms alone is supplemented by the back and the legs. He felt the tip of his middle finger brush against his lip, travel the length of it, until it found the far corner. Just look at the target. It doesn’t matter, he told himself. It matters, said the voice. But that’s all right. That helps.

  He’d never thought of it like that before. It matters. And that helps. Yes, he thought, it helps, and the arrow flew.

  It lifted, the way an arrow does, swimming in the slight headwind he presumed he’d allowed for, though he had no memory of doing so. It lifted, reaching the apex of its flight, and he thought: however long I live, let a part of me always be in this moment, this split second when I could’ve shot a hundred-yard possible; this moment at which it’s still on, it hasn’t missed yet, the chance, the possibility is still alive, so that when I’m sixty-six and half blind and a nuisance to my family, I’ll still have this, the one thing that could’ve made me great—

  Uncle Sen walked to the target. He wasn’t carrying his flags. He stood for a moment, the only thing that existed in the whole world. Then he raised both his arms and shouted.

  Oh, Teucer thought; and then something hit him in the back and sent him flat on his face in the grass, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe, and it hurt. He was thinking: who’d want to do that to me; they’re supposed to be my friends. And then he was grabbed by his arms and yanked upright, and everybody was shouting in his face, and Pilad’s grin was so close to his eyes he couldn’t see it clearly; and he thought: I did it.

  He didn’t actually want to go and look, just in case there had been a mistake, but they gave him no choice; he was scooped up and planted on two bony shoulders, so that he had to claw at heads with his fingers to keep from falling off. At the butts they slid him off on to his knees, so that when he saw the target he was in an attitude of worship, like in Temple. Fair enough. Arrows nine and ten were both in, clean, not even touching the line
. They looked like a bunch of daffodils, or seedlings badly in need of thinning. A possible. The only man living. And then he thought: they won’t let me pull my arrows out, and they’re my match set, and I can’t afford to buy another one—

  And Pilad, who’d been one of the bony shoulders, gave him another murderous slap on the back and said, “Nicely, Teuce, nicely,” and with a deep feeling of shame and remorse he realised that Pilad meant it; no resentment, no envy, sheer joy in his friend’s extraordinary achievement. (But if Pilad had been the shooter, how would he be feeling now? Don’t answer that.) He felt as if he’d just betrayed his friend, stolen from him or told lies about him behind his back. He wanted to say he was sorry, but it would be too complicated to explain.

  They let him go eventually. Pilad and Nical walked with him as far as the top of the lane. He explained that he wanted to check on the lambs, so he’d take a short cut across the top meadow. It’s possible that they believed him. He walked the rest of the way following the line of the hedge, as though he didn’t want to be seen.

  It was nearly dark when he got home; there was a thin line of bright yellow light under the door and he could smell roast chicken. He grinned, and lifted the latch.

  “Dad, Mum, you’re not going to believe—” He stopped. They were sitting at the table, but it wasn’t laid for dinner. In the middle of it lay a length of folded yellow cloth. It looked a bit like a scarf.

  “This came for you,” his father said.

  He said it like someone had died. It was just some cloth. Oh, he thought. He took a step forward, picked it up and unfolded it. Not a scarf; a sash.

  His mother had been crying. His father looked as though he’d woken up to find all the stock dead, and the wheat burned to the ground and the thatch blown off.

  “I shot a possible,” he said, but he knew it didn’t matter.

  His father frowned, as though he didn’t understand the words. “That’s good,” he said, looking away; not at Teucer, not at the sash. “Well?” his father said suddenly. “Tell me about it.”

  “Later,” Teucer said. He was looking at the sash. “When did this come?”

  “Just after you went out. Two men, soldiers. Guess they’re going round all the farms.”

  Well, of course. If they were raising the levy, they wouldn’t make a special journey just for him. “Did they say when?”

  “You got to be at the Long Ash cross, first light, day after tomorrow,” his father said. “Kit and three days’ rations. They’re raising the whole hundred. That’s all they’d say.”

  It went without saying they had records; the census, conducted by the Brothers every five years. They’d know his father was exactly one year overage for call-up, just as they’d known he had a son, nineteen, eligible. It would all be written down somewhere in a book; a sort of immortality, if you cared to look at it that way. Somewhere in the city, the provincial capital, strangers knew their names, knew that they existed, just as people a hundred years hence would know about Teucer from Merebarton, who’d once shot ten with ten at a hundred yards.

  He wasn’t the least bit hungry now. “What’s for dinner?” he said.

  if you enjoyed

  SIXTEEN WAYS TO DEFEND A WALLED CITY

  look out for

  THE WOLF

  Under a Northern Sky: Book One

  by

  Leo Carew

  In Leo Carew’s thrilling and savagely visceral debut epic fantasy, The Wolf, violence and death come to the land under the Northern Sky when two fierce races break their age-old fragile peace and begin an all-out war.

  Beyond the Black River, among the forests and mountains of the north, lives an ancient race of people. Their lives are measured in centuries, not decades; they revel in wilderness and resilience, and they scorn wealth and comfort.

  By contrast, those in the south live in the moment, their lives more fleeting. They crave wealth and power; their ambition is limitless, and their cunning unmatched.

  When the armies of the south flood across the Black River, the fragile peace between the two races is shattered. On a lightning-struck battlefield, the two sides will fight—for their people, for their land, for their very survival.

  1

  Broken Clockwork

  The rain had not stopped for days. The road was under six inches of brown water. Everything was underwater. Roper’s horse stumbled and collapsed onto its knees; it was all he could do to stay in the saddle.

  “Up,” said Kynortas. “You must be twice the man you expect your legionaries to be.”

  Roper dismounted to allow his horse to rise before swinging himself back into his saddle. The legionaries behind had not noticed; they marched on, heads dipped against the rain.

  “What effect will the rain have?” asked Kynortas.

  “It will shorten the battle,” Roper hazarded. “Formations are easily broken and men die faster when their footing is unsure.”

  “A fair assessment,” Kynortas judged. “Men also fight less fiercely in the rain. It will favour the Sutherners; the legions are more skilled and will struggle to assert their dominance in rain.”

  Roper drank the words in. “How does that change our battle plan, lord?”

  “We have no battle plan,” said Kynortas. “We do not know what we will face. The scouts report that the Sutherners have found a strong position to defend, so we know we must attack; that is all. But,” he went on, “we must be careful with the legions. They take hundreds of years to develop and because they will not run, they can be destroyed in a single battle. Remember this above all: the legions are irreplaceable. Preserve the legions, Roper.”

  Marching at Kynortas’s back were close to ninety thousand soldiers: the full strength of the Black Kingdom. The column, lined with countless banners that hung sodden and limp, stretched miles back down the road and far out of sight. Even now they marched in step, causing waves to pulse through the flood water. There had never been a call-up so vast in Roper’s nineteen years. No man liked summoning all the legions beneath a single banner; the propensity for catastrophe was too great. As Kynortas had said, the legions were irreplaceable. Losing them was the collective fear of every echelon of their nation.

  On this occasion, there had been no choice. Their enemies had gathered an enormous army that threatened to capsize the balance of power in Albion. The force, a composite of Saxon and Frankish soldiers, with mercenaries from Samnia and Iberia, was so big that nobody knew how many men their enemies commanded. But it numbered many more than the legionaries under Kynortas.

  “Why do we not do as the Sutherners do, lord?” asked Roper. “Unify all our peoples under a single banner?”

  Kynortas did not countenance the idea. “Can you imagine any king surrendering control of his forces to another? Can you imagine a dozen kings all agreeing to back the same man?” He shook his head dismissively. “Perhaps one man in a million could unify the Anakim. Perhaps. But I am not the man to do it, and neither will I surrender the legions to any foreign sovereignty.”

  Roper could not imagine a lord greater than Kynortas. As strong in face and limb as were his faith and convictions. Straight-backed and stern, with a thunderous brow and a face as yet unscarred by conflict. His men regarded him; his enemies despised and respected him in equal measure. He knew how to court an ally, cow an enemy and read a battlefield like a poem. He was a tall man, though Roper almost equalled him in that regard already. Theirs was reckoned a strong house, with Roper a promising prospect as Kynortas’s heir, his two younger brothers indemnifying the lineage.

  At the head of the mighty column, the Black Lord and his young heir crested a hill to reveal a great flood plain. Across almost a mile of wind-rippled water lay a ridge of extraordinary length. Whether a natural formation or some ancient battle-works thrown up in this scarred land was not clear, but it stretched almost from horizon to horizon. Its northern flank was guarded by a great forest and on it was arrayed the Suthern horde. Thousands lined the ridge. Tens of thousands;
protected by the mangled and rain-slicked slope. Their banners were as wilted as those of the legions but Roper could make out halberdiers, longbowmen, swordsmen and some who shone greyly on the wet day and must surely be men-at-arms. At the southern edge of the ridge, a vast mass of cavalry sat malevolently.

  It was to be Roper’s first battle. He had never seen one before. He had heard them, rumbling and crashing from afar like a heaving ocean beating against an iron-bound coast. He had seen the warriors return, most weary and bereft, a special few energised and inspired; all filthy and battered. He had seen the wounded treated; watched as surgeons trepanned the skulls of unconscious men or extracted slivers of steel from their forearms, thrown off by the clash of blades. His father had discussed it often, indeed talked of little else to his heir. Roper had studied it; had trained for it from the age of six. His life had so far revolved around this sacred clash and yet he felt utterly unprepared for what he saw before him.

  Laying eyes on the enemy, the Black Lord and his son spurred out of the column’s path. Kynortas snapped his fingers and an aide trotted to his side. “Deploy our army in battle formation, as close as possible to where the flooding begins.” Kynortas rattled off a list of where each legion should be placed in the line, concluding with the observation that all their cavalry would be on the right, “save for those from Houses Oris and Alba, who take the left.”

  “That’s a lot of orders, lord,” said the aide.

  “Delegate.” The aide complied. “Uvoren!”

  A mounted officer detached himself from the column and rode to join Kynortas. “My lord?” His high ponytail, threaded through a hole in the back of his helmet, identified him as a Sacred Guardsman. A silver eye was inlaid into his right shoulder-plate, his helmet covered his eyes and he grinned roguishly at his master.