by Susan Price
“And leave the guns outside?” Joe said. “To show good feeling. We laid down our weapons.” He felt he was pushing his luck too far, but he couldn’t do the Sterkarms a greater service than getting those rifles laid down.
Bryce held himself back from refusing outright. That would only antagonize Windsor as well as the Sterkarms. “I’d strongly advise against it, Mr. Windsor. They outnumber us. The safety catches are on.”
“But better safe than sorry,” Joe said. “It’s all these little kids I’m thinking of. This is someone’s home you’re going into. I’m not asking you to give your guns up—leave ’em here, put a guard on ’em. Just for while you’re in the tower. Just to show friendly.”
Bryce went close to Windsor. “It’s too risky.”
Windsor could see Toorkild watching them. He didn’t want to give the old savage the satisfaction of knowing that he could intimidate them. He didn’t want to give Bryce the satisfaction of nannying him. “Sometimes you just have to take a risk.”
You’re telling me? Bryce thought. “Mr. Windsor, they’re taking you in there.”
Bryce pointed, and Windsor looked up at the square gray-red tower rising against the sky. It threw a qualm into Windsor, and at once made him still more determined to prove he was right by going ahead. He refused to behave like a coward. The bloodied severed head flashed into his memory again—but it hadn’t been the head of an Elf. “We’re going in,” he said, “and we’re leaving the rifles out here.”
“James—”
“I’m in charge!”
“Shit!” Bryce couldn’t let Windsor go in there alone. Nor could he leave the guns out here with no better guard over them than a few security guards and an ex-corporal. But he had to do one or the other.
He went over to the nearest Land Rover, unslung his rifle from his shoulder and dropped it onto the Land Rover’s metal floor. “You, you, you!” Bryce rapidly counted out nine men. “Guns down here.” Only one or two of them began unslinging their rifles. The others looked at each other, spoke, muttering. Either they all shared his fears or they just didn’t want to give up their toys. Bryce was infuriated by their insubordination. “Do it! I didn’t ask for a discussion!” He watched them as, with sour faces, they put their rifles, one by one, on the floor of the Land Rover. “Skipton!”
“Sir!”
Skipton was one of the ex-soldiers, and one of the ten men left still holding rifles. “I’m leaving you in charge here. You guard the guns and the Land Rovers, okay?” Skipton nodded.
Bryce turned to Windsor. “Let’s go.” Under Bryce’s camouflage jacket, in a shoulder holster, he had an old Browning pistol, thirteen shots in its mag. Could be enough if things got outrageous.
Andrea had heard the sound of the Land Rovers’ engines, and then the sound of the horses being led through the tower’s lanes to their stables. She’d gone to the window but hadn’t been able to see anything. The windows on the top story, in Toorkild and Isobel’s private rooms, were the largest in the tower, but they were still small. If you looked straight out, they gave a good view of the surrounding hills and the valley below, but it was all but impossible to look down from them and see what was happening in the tower’s yard, or just outside its walls. The roofs, the wall, got in the way.
She could shout, of course. Take a big breath and yell, as loud as she could: “They’re going to ambush you!” Her heart started beating faster at the thought of it, and she felt breathless and ill.
It was what she’d said she would do.
It was easy to talk.
She didn’t know who was out there—she couldn’t see. If there were car engines, then there must be people from the 21st, but had they come armed, as she’d feared, or did they just have briefcases and five-year business forecasts?
What if she shouted, and alarmed the Sterkarms into turning on the 21st men and killing them?
What if the 21st men had come armed, and her shout made them open fire on the Sterkarms and gun them down, women, children and all?
Either way, it would be her fault.
She went back to the hearth and sat in Toorkild’s chair. A fire burned in the hearth, and she had a box of fuel to feed it. There was meat, bread and ale on the table. Both Toorkild and Isobel were angry with her, but she was still a guest under their roof. And still thought of, she feared, by some, as their son’s future wife.
She got up again. She couldn’t sit there, warm, by a fire, while murder might be going on outside. She listened at the window again, and heard voices but not what they were saying. She could see tiny sheep moving distantly, in the valley, but not the people a few feet below.
She walked around the table, around and around. People were going to be hurt. Had Per been hurt? He’d been up on the hill when the Elves had come through.
This whole project must have seemed such a good idea on paper. Go in, get the gold, the oil, the gas, make a profit. It was always people who loused things up.
Joe’s heart was swollen and tight in his chest, and yet it was rattling away in there with a painful rapidity and force. The soldiers had given up their rifles, but he didn’t suppose they’d given up every weapon. In a couple of minutes, he could be dead.
They’d come through the tower gate and were getting close to the tower itself. Toorkild was on one side of him, slightly ahead; and Windsor on the other, slightly behind. Bryce was behind Windsor, and behind him came the soldiers and the Sterkarms. Joe, remembering that he should be seeming happy and relaxed, tried to smile at Windsor but felt his face freeze into a grimace.
As they reached the tower door, Bryce called out, “Wait!”
Toorkild stopped in the act of opening the door.
“I’ll go in first,” Bryce said. Behind him the rabble of Sterkarms and 21st men filled the yard in front of the tower, and crowded the alleys leading to it.
Toorkild must have guessed his meaning, because he grinned through his beard, stood aside and waved for Bryce to go into the tower before him.
Bryce edged to the door, leaning against its doorpost and keeping well back from the opening while he peered into the shadows inside. His hand was inside his jacket, on the grip of his pistol. With his free hand, he beckoned to one of his men. “Go in.”
“Me?” the man said.
“Go in,” Bryce said. The man looked around at his colleagues, and then at Bryce again. “That’s an order,” Bryce said. “Were you expecting a walk in the park?”
Slowly, as if his boots were filled with concrete, the man came forward to the tower’s door. He hesitated, and looked at Bryce, but then fear of his colleagues’ contempt, or fear of losing his job, or both, overcame his fear of what was in the tower. He leaped in through the door.
The Sterkarms standing in the yard laughed genially. Inside the tower, the security guard was walking about, kicking up the straw on the floor. He started laughing himself. “Nothing in here but shit.”
Bryce leaned in at the door to check for himself. The ground floor of the tower was dark, lit only by the light from the low, narrow door, which was blocked by Bryce himself. Fragments of light played on the upper walls, and over the curved barrel vault of the ceiling. There was a sweet, rank smell of horse dung.
“Check the stairs,” Bryce said. He watched the man come toward him, to the foot of the stairs that rose from just inside the left-hand side of the door. It was a job he should be doing himself. He didn’t like sending this poor dim herbert into danger, but if he did the brave thing and got killed, who’d watch Windsor’s stupid back?
The stairs were guarded by a heavy iron grid, which the man pulled back with a sound of metal scraping on stone. He peered into the dark, narrow stairway. “Nobody here.”
Toorkild, leaning at the other side of the door with his arms folded, grinned indulgently at Bryce and asked him—as far as Bryce understood—whether he was gladdened now. �
��Not yet,” Bryce said. He moved into the cool shadows of the tower’s ground floor and took up a position at the foot of the stairs. “Go on up,” he said to the guard. “Have a look around the corner.”
The man looked at him, swallowed hard but started to climb, moving his hand up the plaster. As he got closer to the turn in the stairs, he moved slower and slower, looking around the bend at the few stairs ahead with nothing but the corner of one eye. Half of him disappeared, and Bryce beckoned another man forward. “Stand here. Yell if anybody moves.”
Bryce climbed the stairs after the first man. The first few steps were lit by light from the doorway, but then they curved and became dark, until they turned another curve of the spiral—and then light appeared again, through a narrow slit in the wall. Looking up, Bryce saw light spilling down from the landing, partly shadowed by the man ahead of him. “What d’you see?”
“Nothing,” the man said.
Bryce moved up alongside him. Together, they blocked the stairs. Ahead was the small square landing, grayly lit by one slit window. The door into the hall was standing open, letting through a little more light. Beyond the open door, on the other side of the landing, the dark stairs continued up.
A man came to the open door, leaned on the post and grinned at them.
Bryce pushed his man out onto the landing, while he took up a position at the top of the stairs. “Go and check those stairs out.” As his man crossed the landing, Bryce watched the Sterkarm in the doorway.
The Sterkarm watched the man pass him with friendly curiosity and then, when the security man had vanished into the darkness of the farther stair, grinned at Bryce instead.
“Down there,” Bryce called. “Everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine,” came the shout from below.
Echoing footsteps on the farther stair, and the 21st man came back down. “Nothing up there,” he said. “Just a locked door at the top. Nobody about.”
“Fine,” Bryce said, gesturing toward the hall door. “Have a look in there.”
The security guard was more relaxed now, but he approached the hall door a little warily, because of the man leaning there. Seeing his nervousness, the Sterkarm grinned again, shouldered himself off the wall and went back inside the hall. The security guard stuck his head around the door.
“Anybody near the door?” Bryce asked. “How many people?”
“No. Five or six. Five. And a woman.”
Mention of a woman made Bryce feel very slightly happier. “Okay. Come back to the stairs.” As his man came back to the top of the stairs, Bryce went forward to look into the hall himself. It was set out as if for a meal, with long trestle tables laid with jugs and platters of bread. A fire was burning in the hearth, and something was boiling in a big pot. But the woman in the hall was Andrea. She was sitting right at the far end, at a table placed across the room. She saw him, she lifted her head and sat straighter, but then she looked at the big man sitting beside her before, again, staring down the length of the hall at Bryce.
When he backed out of the hall, back to the top of the stairs, he still wasn’t sure whether she’d been trying to warn him or signal to him that everything was all right. Certainly the hall seemed to be prepared for a meal, just as the Sterkarms had promised.
“Stay here,” Bryce said to his man, and went back down the stairs. Just inside the doorway of the tower, Toorkild and Isobel were waiting, their arms around each other. Windsor was beside them. Unable to talk, they were nodding and smiling at each other. “It all seems okay,” Bryce said, “but I’d still be happier if we stayed outside.”
“Toorkild just wants to be friends,” Joe said. He spoke too quickly for Bryce’s liking.
Windsor said, “For God’s sake, Bryce!” and laughed. He felt much easier now Bryce had checked the tower out, but he wasn’t going to admit to ever having felt nervous. “Here’s Mrs. Sterkarm, going in with us. How much reassurance do you need?”
Bryce’s mind ranged over possibilities. Now that Windsor had committed them to this, there weren’t many options. He stood back and gestured to the stairs.
Toorkild, with a forgiving smile, handed Isobel to the stairs ahead of him, and himself led the way for Windsor, who was followed by Joe. Bryce went next, to keep close to Windsor, but he waved to his men to come on in after him.
So many people were a tight fit on the narrow stairs. Their hands, moving on the wall, touched; they trod on each other’s heels and jostled each other with their knees. The musty, sour smell of the Sterkarms was also unpleasantly noticeable in the enclosed space. Windsor was just wishing they could climb faster, when Toorkild stopped at the small window, his large body completely blocking the way. He pointed to the window, smiled at Windsor, and said something.
Windsor smiled back, irritably aware that Isobel was continuing on up the stairs ahead of them. The window was so small that he couldn’t look through it until Toorkild leaned aside. When he did, he couldn’t see anything except a scrap of sky and some thatched roofs. He turned to Joe, behind him, hoping for a translation.
Joe smiled. He hadn’t understood a word Toorkild had said, hadn’t really tried. He was too nervous.
“What’s the holdup?” Bryce asked.
“Nothing, nothing,” Joe said, and Toorkild murmured something in a comforting tone.
Below them the 21st men were pushing in through the tower’s door, pushed in by the Sterkarms jostling behind them. Since the stair was blocked, the men had to spread across the tower’s ground floor, forming into a ragged line for the stairs. Farther in and farther they crammed, until some of them reached the cold stone of the far wall. And then the small, cold room darkened. Looking up, the men saw a moving shadow—the patch of light on the upper part of the wall was shifting, shrinking as the tower door closed.
The 21st men shouted, lunged for the door. One, reaching it, was punched in the face and went backward into the tower, with a bleeding nose. The tower door was pulled shut from outside, slammed into its stone setting. Its key was turned from outside.
As the voices from below rose in panic, Toorkild turned and hurried on up the stairs to the landing and the door into the hall. Reaching behind, he grabbed Windsor by the arm, urged him on up the last few steps and shoved him into the hall.
Joe, behind Windsor, was yanked upward by Toorkild’s sudden, tight grip on his arm. He was almost lifted from his feet as Toorkild shoved him in front of himself, into the hall, and pressed in after him. Men waiting inside the hall flung the door shut.
The door, heavy and wooden, slammed shut, with an echoing din, in Bryce’s face. He had his hand inside his jacket, on the grip of his Browning pistol—but he was left without a target.
The man he’d left on guard at the top of the stairs was sprawled on the stone floor of the landing, looking dazed. “Get up!” Bryce said.
From below came the dismally echoing shouts of the men trapped on the stairs. From farther below, on the ground floor, came the sounds of fists and feet banging on the locked door. The sound boomed and rebounded from the stone walls.
Bryce felt the thick stone of the tower enclose him. Sterkarms above them, and Sterkarms outside. Exactly what he’d feared, what he’d tried to warn Windsor about.
He went to the narrow landing window and tried to see what was going on below the tower, but could see little except the matched roofs of outhouses. A breeze blew in through the unglazed window, carrying a spatter of cold rain. The cold light the slit admitted lit Bryce’s face, and little else. Behind him the landing and stair were in deep shadow.
What to do?
He had a pistol, some plastic explosive and some grenades.
They had Windsor, Andrea and the captured security men—supposing that any of those people were still alive.
Things were getting outrageous.
Windsor, dragged into the hall, jerked half from his feet,
laughed, thinking it some sort of horseplay. He didn’t like it but thought he ought to laugh along with it, to show that he could take a joke.
Laughing, he turned to find the door of the hall shut, and a thick bar of wood dropped across it, and himself alone among many Sterkarm men, who looked big, hairy, grimy and threatening even when there wasn’t any special reason to fear them. Toorkild was looking at him with no trace of laughter. Windsor looked around for nice Mrs. Sterkarm.
Long trestle tables ran the length of the room—but men were already moving the jugs and platters from them and putting them on the floor around the hearth. Other men lifted the boards and stacked them against the walls, or folded the trestles. As Windsor watched, alarmed, the center of the floor was cleared, exposing a wooden trapdoor at the center of the stone floor and giving him a clear view of the hearth, where a large pot was suspended over the fire. White steam coiled from the pot, together with smoke.
Trying to turn fright into anger, Windsor demanded, “What’s going on?”
Joe was feeling hilarious. It was the way Toorkild had yanked him, flying, into the room, and the audacity of what the Sterkarms had done. “You’ve been stitched up like a kipper, pal, that’s what’s going on!” He lifted his feet in a heavy dance. “Makes a change, eh? How’s it feel? How’s it feel to be the one that’s stitched up for once?”
Windsor goggled at him, understanding only that he was in trouble, perhaps even in danger—and before he had time to think any further, he spotted Mrs. Sterkarm. She was at the back of the room, standing with Andrea. He shouted at Andrea, “What’s going on?”
All Andrea knew for sure was that, a little while ago, she’d been released from the upper floor and brought down to the hall, where she’d glimpsed Bryce in the doorway. When she’d asked what was going on, Sweet Milk had smiled, pointed to the tables and said, “We’re going to have a feast.”
