by Joe Horan
At school she showed an aptitude for numbers which got her apprenticed to the cartographers. Aged sixteen she travelled to Ochira City from the clan’s landholding in the north on a wagon loaded with grain, found herself a single room and hadn’t been outside the city walls since. She kept in intermittent contact with her family by letter; there was no official postal service but anyone travelling in the right direction would take a message for you. If necessary they would pass it on to someone else until eventually it reached its destination.
It was at the Institute of Cartography that she found a way to contribute to society. The first time she signed her name on a map that she personally prepared she felt an incredible sense of achievement. This was what she was born to do. Her fragile body was no handicap. Somehow her brain could convert tables of numbers into contours; hills valleys, slopes and streambeds. The precision and attention to detail that seemed to come naturally meant that now, at only twenty-two years old, she was being entrusted with the most complex and difficult work.
But she was starting to realise that today something was wrong. The locked doors, the absence of people on the streets and now the look in Alysa’s eyes told her it was something bad.
“What’s happened?” she asked.
“The city is under siege. The Kaun Army arrived last night. We’re surrounded.”
“What happened to the army? To King Astur?”
“The army has been destroyed. As for the king, his head was pitched over the wall at first light. King Shalmazar sent emissaries with terms of surrender. All the men and boys would be put to the sword and the women and girls would be slaves. It was so outrageous that Princess Desiree ordered their heads cut off and thrown over the wall. Then she appealed for volunteers to defend the city, anyone capable of lifting a sword. I’m stepping forward; I’m just here to collect my weapons.”
Shania nearly said, You can’t fight; you’re a girl, but stopped herself in time. You didn’t say that sort of thing in Ochira. Their law gave women parity with men in everything. There had never been women warriors, but there was no reason why there could not be.
“Go home, Shania,” said Alysa kindly. “There’s nothing you can do.”
That was true. She probably didn’t have the strength even to lift a sword. Her people were in desperate trouble and she could do nothing to help. All she could do was hide in her little flat and wait for – for what? For death, probably. She had no expectation the three thousand veteran warriors that were all they had, plus however many volunteers came forward, could defend the city against the Kaun Army.
Alysa had a set of keys to get into the Institute. Shania thought of following her, but what could she do? Ochira needed people who were good with weapons now, not numbers. She went home.
Twelve thousand volunteers, including two thousand women and girls, gathered in the main square between the palace and the main gate. Princess Desiree regarded her army. It was a shambles. They had been given practice swords to train with and it was a good job they hadn’t been given real swords otherwise there was every chance they would hurt themselves.
She had five hundred of her veteran warriors in there trying to teach then what to do, demonstrating proper sword strokes and trying to get the volunteers to copy them. Desiree had been training since her tenth birthday, when she told her father she wished to take the Warrior Path and he encouraged her. She knew how to fight with a sword, a bow and a dagger. She knew how to control the pain if she was wounded. She knew how to face certain death with equanimity. The volunteers had shown courage in stepping forward, but how much they could learn in a matter of days was debatable.
The watchman on the main gate tower blew his horn, then leaned over the edge and shouted down, “Horseman coming out of the camp.”
Desiree took the steps four at a time. She reached the top, nodded to the warriors stationed on the wall and waited for the watchman to report.
“A horseman is riding towards the gate, my lady,” he said.
She turned and looked. A lone rider carrying a banner in the dark red of Kaun. He was halfway across the open ground between the main Kaun camp and the wall. He stopped and then, across the intervening space, came the sound of a voice trained to make itself heard at a distance, a herald.
“Hear the words of the great King Shalmazar. Your insolence has been noted and will not go unpunished. Every man, woman, child, horse, dog and cat in Ochira City will die. Those that die by the sword will be the lucky ones. We have many ways of killing, some more terrible than others. For those taken alive, only the most terrible will be employed.”
“Simon, how far away do you think he is?” asked Desiree. “Two hundred yards?”
“At least two hundred.”
She pulled the bow over her shoulder and selected the straightest arrow from her quiver. A little over two hundred yards and she was standing on top of a tower eighty feet above ground level. There was a gentle breeze from the right. She notched the arrow, pulled it back and let fly. She followed it with her eyes as it arced up and then down. If the herald was paying attention he could have stepped aside, but he wasn’t. He didn’t move until his voice was cut off abruptly and he fell. The warriors on the wall cheered.
Chapter 3
The Day the Sky Fell
The wave blast rippled through space. When the Colossus exploded the enormous mass of energy dumped into a confined area of space ruptured the continuum. Zero point energy was released, driving the blast wave deep into subspace and accelerating it beyond the speed of light. Its initial speed was in excess of a thousand LUs, but only tachyons get a free pass to travel faster than light. For everything else the Rachman-Schloes effect is inevitable and the blast wave immediately started to slow as it lost energy to the vacuum.
Behind the blast wave came Engineering Technician Steph Croxon. The Mark VI Escape Pod was lightspeed capable and she had managed to get it to just over five LUs despite the spatial distortions in the wake of the blast wave.
It was the eighth day of the siege. Prince Joaquin climbed to the top of the main gate tower at first light as he had done for the previous seven mornings, ever since the Kaun army arrived. He supposed he should call himself King Joaquin now that his father was dead, but somehow there seemed to be no point. He would be dead soon enough, as would all the other people in Ochira City.
This could only end one way, despite his sister’s efforts to train up the volunteers. There were a few thousand men garrisoned in the north, a few more in the south. If they all marched together to Ochira City it would not be enough to lift the siege. Ochira would end; all they had built would be lost. For all his supposed wisdom he could see no way out.
Centuries ago, they had been like the other kingdoms, living in superstitious fear of angry gods, their society characterised by inequality, slavery and state-sanctioned abuse of women. Then some unknown wise man or woman gave them the Five Truths, which every Ochiran child was taught as soon as they were old enough to understand:
The World had a beginning; it will also have an end. What comes between is not written until it occurs.
The World is understandable by observation and reason.
Nothing is forever; no belief is so ancient that it cannot be changed.
All humans are born free and equal.
Fear is an enemy that can be defeated.
So they came to know the true nature of the universe; that there were no angry gods, just unchangeable natural laws which could be studied and understood. They accepted that all men and women were equal and slavery became anathema to them. They built a society based on freedom and equality, but while they did so they took their eyes off their borders and King Shalmazar launched his invasion. Now it would all end. Those who survived would be enslaved, the Five Truths would be forgotten and what they had built here would be lost forever.
He waited while the sun rose, showing him what had happened in the night. On a low ridge just out of bowshot of the wall was a line of six trebuchets,
huge stone-throwing machines. They had been set up opposite the section of wall between the North Bastion and the Tower of the Guard, one of the few sections that had not been reinforced during his father’s emergency reconstruction program. Someone’s sold them the plans of our defences he thought.
The blast front approached the planet known to its inhabitants as the World. It was still a quantum wave only partly in normal space, a complex mix of gravity waves, exotic particles and high energy electromagnetic radiation travelling at several times the speed of light, but it was starting to undergo transition to a sublight form. The Rachman-Schloes effect was at its highest as huge quantities of energy returned to the vacuum.
It approached almost in the plane of the orbit, and exposed to the blast the ground was seared clean of life and the seas were sterilized down to the ocean floor, but most of the continent on which the war between the kingdoms of Kaun and Ochira was approaching its bloody and dramatic climax was turned away from the blast front. However, even on the shielded side of the planet the consequences were devastating. Ochira was in the daytime hemisphere, and when the blast front hit the sun the outer layers were heated dramatically. The result was what amounted to a brief but intense nova.
It was morning on the eighth day. Shania had never been this scared in her life. Her flat consisted of two rooms above a baker’s shop, so she didn’t have to go far to get bread. The baker always kept a loaf or two back for her, but food prices were rising inexorably. The city was grossly overcrowded. It seemed every family had relatives staying with them; when the war started King Astur had encouraged people from the surrounding countryside to take refuge behind the walls of Ochira City.
“Shania! Shania!”
It was the baker’s wife calling up to her.
“What is it?” she replied.
“Trebuchets, six of them, on the Elbow.”
She felt the fear knotting in her stomach. Six trebuchets on the low ridge known as the Elbow, just out of bowshot of the city wall. And the wall there was a single skin. Today would be the day. She sat on the bed for a while, staring at the wall. After they had killed his emissaries King Shalmazar would show no mercy. Every man, woman and child in the city would be put to the sword. She stood shakily on her crippled legs, went to the window and looked across to the far side of the city, to where the trebuchets were, or soon would be, battering a breach in the wall. The Kaun Army would come pouring through, slaughter the warriors and the volunteers if they could be persuaded to stand and fight, then spread out across the city. Many Ochiran women would take their own lives to avoid having to endure rape; others would use their daggers to try and take at least one of the attackers with them. Shania knew she would never have the courage to kill herself or anyone else, but then her frail body would not live long under assault from a man. Ancestors help me! Please give me the courage to face my end like an Ochiran.
She stood there motionless, her little heart pounding with fear. Then the ground began to shake. An earthquake? You must be kidding me! They were not uncommon in the mountains of the north, but though they were rare in the central plains they did occur. They were known to be caused by natural movements in the World’s crust, not the work of gods or demons, but with the Kaun Army poised to breach the walls what was the chance of an earthquake occurring at exactly this moment?
There were ripples of light in the sky and the moon Shydor was shining much brighter than normal. That was something she had never seen before. The ripples faded away but the moon still shone. She looked out across the city. No visible damage. She wondered what King Shalmazar would make of it. Kaun still believed in omens, but it was too much to hope they would view it as a sign that they should withdraw from Ochira City.
Another trebuchet swung round. Four had fired so far. Three stones had fallen short. One had gone over the wall and crashed into the houses beyond. It had caused considerable damage and probably some casualties, but that was not the intention. Now as Prince Joaquin followed the flight of the fifth stone he realised it was on target. It struck the wall with a loud crash. Dust rose into the air. The wall was still intact, but under the repeated impact of those huge stones it would quickly start to fail. Now that they had the range there would soon be more hits than misses.
“How long will it take them?” asked Desiree, arriving beside him. She was wearing her battle armour with her sword at her side and her bow slung over her shoulder, a fourteen-year-old Amazon ready to fight.
“Two hours, maybe three,” he responded.
“I’ll get the troops organised,” she said and disappeared down the stairs. He was uncomfortably aware that should be his job, but Desiree was so much better at it. Seasoned warriors would follow her to the death, even in a hopeless fight like this. She might even get the volunteers to stand their ground. What would he do without his valiant little sister?
Several stones fell short before another stone struck the base of the wall. He watched the dust rise. Still no obvious damage, but it was only a matter of time. He supposed he ought to put his armour on and find his sword before joining Desiree and the defenders behind the wall. He would be precious little use in a fight, but if he was going to die he might as well do so looking like a warrior.
He felt a slight vibration transmitted through the fabric of the tower. Was the wall collapsing? No, it did not appear to be. Then what? The vibration grew more pronounced, then he noticed Shydor, the moon. It was just above the western horizon and it was shining more brightly than it had ever done before, almost as brightly as the sun and there were ripples of light in the sky. The vibration grew more intense. There were screams coming from the city now. Prince Joaquin had felt one earthquake during his life. It was a frightening experience even though he knew it was a natural upheaval that the World sometimes went through, the outworking of natural laws that, though they did not yet fully understand, must be have a rational explanation. But this was different. There were lights in the sky and he had no idea what could be causing them. The vibration gradually died away and the lights in the sky faded, though Shydor still shone unnaturally bright. He waited. He knew that could not be the end of it…
Suddenly the sun flared blindingly bright. He felt the heat burning his skin and instinctively stepped back into the shade of the stairway. The screams that assailed his ears now were screams of agony. Somewhere in his mind was the knowledge that those in the city who had the sense to seek shade might yet survive, but out on the surrounding plains the Kaun army had nowhere to hide. Perhaps the gods did exist, and they had intervened to save them.
Desiree was forming up the troops behind the section of wall that was under attack. The three thousand trained men knew where to go and what to do, but the twelve thousand volunteers had to be told. She was going up and down the lines, physically pulling them into place.
“Whatever happens stand your ground,” she said. “Fill the gaps in the line as they occur.”
All of them were terrified. No point telling them it would be all right. Everyone knew they were going to die. They were hopelessly outnumbered and King Shalmazar had made it quite clear that everyone in the city, men, women and children, would be put to the sword. The veterans knew that sometimes there was nothing except an impossible fight against overwhelming odds, but the raw recruits were still hoping for a miracle. The chances were that they would break and run as soon as the Kaun army came through the breach.
“Stand and fight,” she said. “Never let the enemy see your back.”
She came to a group of women. There were just over two thousand women among the volunteers, most of them girls in their late teens or early twenties. It seemed like a great adventure when they were given swords and told they could train alongside the men. Now it came down to it their faces were white, their hands were shaking. Some of them were weeping quietly. What could she say that would possibly help them?
“We won’t let you down, my lady,” said one of them.
Desiree put a name to that pale, tear-st
ained face framed by the glorious red hair. Eoline Strike, eighteen, daughter of a well-to-do cloth merchant.
“I know you won’t, Eoline,” she said quietly, then loudly for all to hear, “Women are just as brave as men. I know you will stand your ground until the end.”
“How can you be so brave, my lady?” asked Eoline.
“The Five Truths say that fear is an enemy that can be defeated. Remember that.”
A trite response, but in a way it was true. She was only fourteen, the youngest by far of all those here, but since her tenth birthday she had prepared her heart for this day. She was afraid, of course she was afraid, but when she chose the warrior path she accepted that a warrior’s death might be her destiny. Accepted it and came to terms with it. Many an enemy would die upon her blade before she finally fell.
“Keep watching me,” she said. “Do what I do. Stand your ground and show no fear.”
And some of them would, she was sure. Eoline Strike would die facing the enemy, weapon in hand. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
There was a crash. Another stone had struck the wall. There was a crack in the masonry now, running from the top almost to the bottom. This section of wall was old, the weakest point in the city’s defences. King Shalmazar had chosen his point of attack well. It was time to take up her position in the centre of the foremost rank. The plan was to greet the first wave of warriors through the breach with a volley of arrows, then draw swords and hold them hand-to-hand for as long as possible in a hopeless fight. She knew that Joaquin would join her before the wall was breached. He was no warrior, but neither was he a coward and when the end came he would die with honour. She would have to ignore him, allow him to die while she concentrated on fighting her own battle. That would be the hardest part.
