Several members of the Assembly began backing toward the gate. When the head tailor and artisan broke into a run, a pair of horsemen sprang from the ring in pursuit, swords raised. The archers on the wall released a volley of arrows, felling them. The archers took aim now at the ring around the general.
“No!” Skye called, moving herself between the wall and the horsemen. “Stay your hands!”
But she could hardly be heard above the bursts of shouting. Iliff dashed to her side.
“There’s too much confusion,” he yelled. “We have to get back inside the gate.”
Iliff was looking toward the wall when he spied a dark figure in the tower south of the gatehouse. He would not have noticed him but for the cross-bow he propped through the narrow window. The figure adjusted the position of the bow and crouched before it. Iliff pulled Skye from her stance and got her moving toward the gate. This arrow thudded into one of the Garott captains who grunted and fell from his steed.
As they neared the trench, Iliff glanced up to see archers bunching from the crenels, their bows aimed almost straight down. He had been so concerned with keeping himself between the shooter and Skye that he had ignored the pounding hoofbeats at their backs. The arrows flew and the pounding ceased.
Iliff and Skye were the last ones across the bridge. Stype helped them through the gate before ordering the portcullis dropped.
“It’s Lucious,” Iliff gasped. “He’s in the tower south of us. On the second level.”
Stype nodded and signaled for several of the guards to follow him.
Through the portcullis, Iliff could see the bodies of the slain Garott. Somehow the white flag had fallen from the gatehouse and now lay among them, its fabric writhing in the wind as though struggling to stand. The surviving Garott, four of them, turned their horses and sprinted toward the encampment. Over the front of the lead horse lay the body of their fallen sovereign.
And then the drawbridge boomed home, and the world was shut out once more.
Chapter 24
The shouts began shortly after the horsemen returned, rumbling and rising from behind the great timber wall, ever more fearsome and furious. Soon the land itself seemed to tremble. Birds lifted from the surrounding woodland in dark clouds and disappeared over the hills. Iliff and Skye had followed Horatio to the top of the west gatehouse, and now Skye ran over to where he stood watching the field. All along the stone walls Fythe archers and guards readied their weapons.
“This cannot collapse into warfare,” Skye cried. “We must get a message to them.”
“How?” Horatio asked, his tone somber. “They will trust nothing that comes from us now.”
“I will go,” she said. “I have met with them before.”
Horatio shook his graying head. “Listen to their cries. They want only one thing now, and that is our blood. They would cut you down on sight, Skye. No. As friend to your father, I cannot allow it.”
Before Skye could insist further, there was movement in the far fields. All of them pressed toward the crenellations. The movement was hard to make sense of at first because it was unusual, but it soon became evident that the wall itself was moving. Large vertical sections had separated out and, like giants roused from sleep, shook and inched forward.
“What dark magic is this?” asked one of the guards.
“It is no magic,” Iliff said. He looked on in dread and wonder. “See how they move? They’re using ropes and pulleys from behind to drive the sections forward. It was how they built their wall.”
Among the arriving masses that first day, Iliff recalled seeing someone who had appeared smaller and fairer than the rest of the Garott. He had noticed the person again on the second day when they had begun erecting their wall. He was nearly certain now that he had seen Depar.
Horatio turned to Skye. “Look out there. It is too late for talk. Now please, get to the Keep and see that all are inside who should be. Then ready the field hospitals. And your men, Iliff. See that they are at their stations.”
Iliff and Skye descended the stairwell together. But when they reached the bottom of the gatehouse, Skye did not go to the Keep; instead, she turned to the guards who stood on either side of the closed gate.
“Please,” she said. “Lower the bridge so that we might retrieve the flag.”
The guard nearest her dipped his chin. “I’m sorry, my lady,” he said. “The captain has ordered the town sealed. We are not to open the gates for any reason.”
Iliff watched Skye’s eyes contract, and in the next moment the guards snapped to. They began rushing to raise the portcullis and lower the drawbridge. They seemed not to hear Horatio, who shouted at them from above, demanding to know what they were doing.
“I do not like to manipulate their emotions so,” Skye said to Iliff. “But under circumstances as these…”
Iliff nodded. “I’ll go with you.”
The moment the drawbridge fell, Iliff and Skye were running over it. They sprinted into the field, avoiding the empty gazes of the fallen. Iliff found the flag and brought it to her. Skye held it high and waved it in powerful arcs. Her hair and body shimmered, touching off bits of color around her where, only moments before, there had been none. The gray air lightened. Even the clouds seemed to yield to her at last, rising from their low, dense drift to swirl white in places. For a moment Iliff became lost in her resplendent image.
But as the minutes passed and no response came, the colors around Skye faltered, then faded. Iliff turned toward the far fields. The Garott continued to roar, their walls edging ever nearer in the coming dusk.
“I’m sorry,” Iliff said, taking her hand.
* * *
As the evening deepened, the sections of wall, nine of them, were close enough that Iliff and the guards could hear the Garott grunting behind them, urging them onward. Sharp commands sounded at intervals. Though the masses of Garott stayed hidden, heads peered over the top of the wooden colossuses from time to time in order to direct their course.
Iliff stood on the wall walk near the west gate. With the men of the wall crew at their stations, Iliff had run to the armory and returned wearing a metal breastplate and helmet and bearing a sword and shield.
“They are within range,” one of the archers called. “Shall we fire?”
“No,” Horatio called back. “I will address them.”
He ordered the archers from the crenels and stood so that he was the only one in view. “Lo there!” he called to the nearest wall, a mere fifty meters’ distance now. “I am Horatio, captain of the Fythe Guard. Halt your progress so that I may speak to you.”
The wall continued its march.
“Hear me!” he shouted. “It was a renegade who felled your general. His act was unsanctioned and craven, and he is now imprisoned. We, the Fythe, do not wish war with you.”
To everyone’s surprise, the grunts and shouting ceased, and the wall shuddered to a halt. The Fythe archers peered around the stone merlons, their bows still hidden but flexing. Everyone listened for a response, but nothing emerged. Horatio moved closer to the crenel. At almost the same moment, murmurings sounded from behind the Garotts’ wall. A series of loud cracks followed, as wood being split.
“Come from there,” Iliff called. “I have an ill feeling.”
Horatio was just waving Iliff back when the wooden wall fell away in two sections, like doors coming off their hinges. In the sudden space stood a tower that rose to the height of the stone wall, its three curtained levels packed with Garott. Black arrows began flying at the crenel. Horatio grunted and fell to the stone floor of the wall walk.
“You’re struck!” Iliff cried, rushing to his side.
Horatio’s hand went to the gash on his cheek. “No, just grazed,” he muttered. “I knew it was foolish, but I had to make the attempt.” He rose to his feet, his face smeared red, and raised his sword.
“Fire at will!” he shouted.
The Fythe archers aimed their arrows through slits in the merlons a
nd let them fly. The Garotts’ tower was well defended, though, and most of the arrows struck the wooden curtains behind which the enemy crouched. The Garott returned fire through slits of their own. A storm of arrows criss-crossed the channel, but few found their marks. The tower, which was set on stout wheels, began to rumble forward.
“Look there,” Stype called. “They mean to leap the wall!”
Iliff followed Stype’s finger to a pack of Garott crouched behind a defensive wall on the tower’s top. They were difficult to see, even beneath a night sky that remained faintly luminous. The Fythe archers redirected their fire upward and Iliff unsheathed his sword. Word came down the line that all of the wooden walls had opened thus and were sending forth siege towers.
As the towers drew nearer, the fighting became more fierce. Archers on both sides were now able to place their arrows into the spaces through which their opponents fired. Though most of the arrows skittered and clanged from armor, cries pealed forth now and again. Iliff watched the archer to his right fall from his position, an arrow lodged deep in his arm. Before Iliff could get to him, two volunteers appeared with a litter, lifted the wounded man onto it, and rushed him into the gatehouse.
Iliff and the guards stood apart from the archers, their grips white around their sword hilts. The nearest siege tower was close enough to their wall now that Iliff could no longer see it from his angle. Holding his shield up, he moved close to a crenel to chance a look. The tower had stopped before the trench, ten meters from the wall. Iliff peered to his left. Another tower was nearly to the trench line as well, but slowing. Hope rose inside of him.
“They have erred!” he shouted to the guard beside him. “The distance is too far for them to leap.”
But soon there sounded more loud cracks. Iliff turned in time to see the front panel of the nearest tower collapse forward. Sharpened pegs at its top gouged the earth on the far side of the trench. The tower heaved up onto the bridge and churned forward. In the next instant the first leaping, slashing Garott were over the merlons and dropping onto the wall walk. Iliff and the guards rushed forward to meet them. Fythe archers fanned out to the sides, while more arrows rained from the top of the gatehouse.
Iliff gripped his sword and looked this way and that. Metal clashed around him. He sensed movement atop the battlement, but before he could turn and set his feet, a young Garott leapt down and thrust his sword. The blade glanced from Iliff’s breast plate and nicked his arm. Iliff parried the next thrust and was leaping back from a quick slash when an arrow caught the Garott in the side, felling him. Many more Garott went down in this manner, but still they came, emerging from the top of the siege tower and onto the wall.
As the night deepened, rain began to slice down, cold and gray. Pools of water splashed and ran dark along the walk. Iliff faced an enemy here and there, but the Fythe archers had become so well positioned that the engagements were short-lived. The reports coming from all along the wall were the same. The Garott were falling in far greater numbers than the Fythe and could gain no foothold along the wall.
“I suppose we’ll get our victory after all,” Iliff mumbled to no one.
Sometime after midnight, the cries of battle diminished. The Fythe archers directed their bows toward the field now. Iliff peered out through a crenel. Though he could still hear the Garott soldiers, they were no longer coming up through the towers. Iliff lowered his sword arm. For the first time, he noticed the blood along the sleeve of his tunic where the Garott’s blade had bitten him. He looked out into the night, and when he did, a great sadness fell over him. For he knew it would be as Skye said. Rather than deter the Garott, their victory would only strengthen the animosity that bound them. More cruel, more deadly will be the conflicts. Iliff frowned as he wiped his bloodied hand against the thigh of his breeches.
He was peering along the wall now, listening for Horatio’s orders, when his helmet rang. He jerked up his shield and sword and ducked from the crenel. Two more arrows clattered against the merlon beside him. What was this? He spun from the wall. He noticed the guards around him doing the same, the air around them bristling red.
“We’re being attacked from the town!” one of them shouted.
The town?
“Impossible!” Iliff shouted back. “There’s been no breach!”
But breach or no, the arrows were indeed flying from the town, and in greater numbers. Several of the guards grunted and went down, for there were no defenses on the rear of the wall walk. Iliff thought of Lucious. Could he have gotten out? Could he be directing an assault from the town? But to what end? Certainly he had not come to abet the Garott, whom he hated most.
Confusion descended as Fythe guards tried to defend their backs while engaging the resurgent Garott who had begun attacking from the towers again. Iliff ducked from the fighting and peered into the green before the final cottages. Figures darted and crouched, but he could not make them out, not in the dark and rain. Suddenly, a black horror seized his gut.
His crew was down there.
Iliff leaned forward, his shield over his head, and looked for them at their stations. But the few carts he could make out were abandoned. All he could see were the battered bodies of the Garott who had fallen from the wall in the course of the battle. He observed no Fythe.
Pray they fled in time, he thought.
He looked once more toward the gate below, and there lay his friend. He was partly hidden by the mortar box, and rain had darkened his jacket. But though matted and muddied, his pale hair announced him.
“Gilpin!” Iliff screamed.
There was no movement, not even a lifting of his head.
Grief and outrage tore through Iliff just as someone began hammering the alarm bell in the town center. He raised his eyes from his fallen friend and tried to see the field hospital in the main lane. There would be wounded guards in there. The women healers. Skye.
Iliff looked again to the green, and now he could make them out. But it was not Lucious nor his militia he saw. No, the shadows that multiplied and signaled to one another were Garott. He was certain of it. But how in damnation had they gotten inside?
An arrow glanced from his helmet and another struck his shield. Iliff got to his feet and wheeled just in time to block the blade of a Garott who had come up from behind. Iliff swung wildly in return, battering him backward and through a crenel, where he plummeted from sight.
The Fythe archers atop the west gatehouse turned their bows from the wall walk to the enemy inside the walls. Free from fire, the Garott outside the walls resumed their surge over the battlement. Fighting with their backs to one another, they pushed the Fythe guards outward, creating pockets along the walk for more and more Garott to leap inside. Iliff and the guards around him labored to hold their position, but at last the Garott became too numerous.
“Retreat!” Horatio called. “To the gatehouse or closest tower! Secure the doors!”
Iliff was among the crush of guards nearer the west gatehouse. Together they backed to the door, their swords and shields braced against the pressing Garott. The last guards inside gave a final heave before closing the door and blocking it, while Iliff and others drove home the bolts. The guards dripped and panted in the sudden stillness and many were gashed. They looked to Horatio. He limped to their center, the side of his head dark with blood.
“They are all along our walls and inside of them somehow,” he said. “We can defend the towers, but only for so long. Our best hope is to get to the Keep before the invaders do. We will hold out better there.”
“We have to clear the field hospitals,” Iliff said.
“Yes, of course.” Though Horatio’s color was pale, his graying eyes held their resolve. “On my word, we will charge them in a wedge. Once through, spread out in a defensive line. Clear the town of Fythe and get them behind us. Fall back toward the Keep. The archers will provide cover. I will go up and signal to the other towers. Down the stairs with you now. Await my word.”
* * *
>
Iliff stood crammed in the stairwell with the guards. Though he could not see the steam rising from their bodies, he could smell its collective mist, could taste the sharpness of blood and fear. No one spoke. They were listening to the rapid footfalls and sharp calls of the Garott along their walls. Iliff thought he could feel some of the guards eyeing him.
This makes no sense at all, blast it! he thought. None have gotten past us, and yet they are out there. Scores of them.
He squeezed his sword’s hilt, aching now to get to the field hospitals.
There came footfalls on the stairs above, and soon Horatio was edging his way past them. He descended to the bottom of the stairwell and stood before the door.
“Be ready!” he shouted.
The guards shifted in their armor. Iliff could hear Horatio counting to himself, each apprehensive breath a descending number: “Three… two… one… Now!” he cried. “We go now!”
The door groaned open and armor clattered from the bottom of the stairwell. The noise wound upward, louder, more deafening. When it reached Iliff, he shook and felt himself being compressed. In the next moment, the noise carried him along the stairwell, like water down a drain. Cold rain shocked his face, and he realized that they had reached the bottom and were piling outside.
Horatio was several meters ahead of them, stooped behind his shield. Guards crouched to either side in a wedge. Iliff joined them on the left. The arrows that flew at them were being countered by a slanting hail from atop the gatehouse. Iliff peeked to where his friend lay facedown in the mud. He had been preparing the mortar, for still he held to the long-handled spade.
Oh, Gilpin, Iliff cried. Dear, dear Gilpin.
With the wedge in place, Horatio signaled for the archers to descend. The Garotts’ assault on their crouched position became furious. Arrowheads pierced and notched their shields, threatening to split them. Soon the Fythe archers emerged from the gatehouse, and arrows flew from both sides again.
“Forward!” cried Horatio. The captain labored to his feet and, flanked by the two slanting lines, charged the Garott.
Lights and Shadows (The Prisoner and the Sun #2) Page 15
