King's Shield

by Sherwood Smith

  “Shit,” she exclaimed. “And we’re being called in to help defend?”

  Fangras spread his hands. “That’s the sved.”

  Gillor eyed him. “And so what’s in it for you? I can’t believe you are running Dhalshev’s errands—oh. Yes. Right. If Sarendan revoked the letters of marque . . .”

  “. . . That’s right,” Fangras said. “Rest of us privateers either have to turn pirate or find someone else. There’s no trade, not with the Venn threatening every harbor with fire and sword if they stick a toe out into the sea. So we’re looking to join your fleet.”

  “All right, we gotta talk to Fox.”

  Fangras started to rise, then sank back down. “Fox? What Fox? Elgar the Fox, or that redheaded, green-eyed icicle Fox?”

  “That would be Fox, yes,” Gillor said, laughing.

  Fangras rubbed his face. “Oh, damn.”

  “You got something against Fox’s fighting skills?”

  “Oh, not his fighting skills. Everyone on Freedom knows no one stands up to him. Some said even he can beat Inda Elgar. But . . . he’s not Inda Elgar, who never loses a battle. Can Fox command one?”

  Gillor thought of Fox sitting on the flagship the way he’d been the last day or so, drinking steadily, so angry you felt it like a blow just walking past his cabin. Never mind why—he wouldn’t tell anyone—but how did he do that?

  “Inda left him in command, and we haven’t lost yet. As you noticed comin’ in.” She pointed through the stern windows at Wind’s Kiss, and then down at the deck under her feet. “Come on, we’ll row ourselves over. You talk to him.”

  Chapter Twenty

  LONG before dawn, Hawkeye and Noddy woke. They were cold and exhausted from bad sleep, but they had reached the top of the pass first.

  Now to hold it.

  They must hold it with five hundred men and an army of straw.

  The intermittent, rumbling din and faint clashes echoing up the stone canyons made it clear the Venn were somewhere near, maybe a day or two away at most. As soon as the light was up, Hawkeye took a couple of scouts and dogs to explore the downward slope and see how much time they had.

  Noddy strolled back, watched by men who’d been straining forward, peering at the cliffs on the downward slope. A glance showed that most were still stupid with sleep, others peered back looking squalid in the way of men who had, under cover of night, taken comfort or consolation in various ways, one of which Noddy could smell. Five years ago a whiff of stale distilled rye would have caused the Harskialdna to assemble the men for a flogging, even on the eve of battle. Noddy pretended he didn’t smell it, though his unsmiling glance as he passed by the dry-tongued culprits with pounding heads was judgment enough.

  Noddy had grown up thinking human beings absurd, though he liked some of them as individuals. He loved few people—his family, his old mates—and few things, one of which was the idea of trust. He loathed war and tended to despise anyone who admired or craved it. But since that admiration or craving seemed to be a part of most of his friends, well, one came back to human absurdity.

  When in doubt, you speak to the absurd, but act up to the ideal.

  He kicked the wheel of the nearest wagon. “Still in the rack. Are you made of straw?”

  A guffaw crashed in echo between the cliffs.

  “Roust up. Drill time! Anyone slacking in the hay gets ninety-nine lashes.”

  More laughter, the high, sharp laughter of people who know through tightened muscles and tense jaws that it’s here, it’s soon, this muddy, mossy canyon is where they would make their stand.

  “Army! To your mounts!” Noddy shouted, flicking straw in the nearest wagon.

  He was answered with a roar as men leaped to the wagons and began making straw men. Noddy continued on down the line so everyone could see him, hear him.

  “Where are your guts?” Noddy slammed a hand against another wagon, making the entire contents jump. “You got grass for brains? Grass prick, for certain. I’ve never seen anything so limp this side of the Venn.”

  More of the harsh laughter of emotional release as everyone got busy stuffing their good shirts and House battle-tunics. Then their secondary clothes, and when they ran out of those, they fashioned man-shaped forms out of bits of rope and blankets. Amid the laughter, people shouted increasingly coarse jokes as everyone tried to make up a name for the straw army that the others would heed. Breath froze and dropped, then clouded, and then vanished as sunlight slowly warmed the high cliffs above with color. The men had woken with numb fingers, but they were sweating by the time they got all the remounts armored with the link-reinforced leddasweave horse covers and the straw men firmly affixed to them, the hems of the battle-tunics sewn to ropes and tied to the armor belly-bands.

  Ribald comments put a wall of mirth between them and what tomorrow or the day after might bring as the men personalized the straw figures wearing their clothing. Noddy watched from the driving bench of the cook wagon, where he’d hopped up to grab something to eat. As soon as the men became restless he’d have them run some mounted drills in order to get used to a charge between walls. But no fighting drills. He wanted them rested and ready. They were as trained as they were ever going to be.

  The shadows on the western cliffs had sunk to the ground and the sun peeked at last over the eastern cliffs, boiling down onto their heads. Noddy climbed down, strolling among the straw men, addressing them as if they were alive.

  The jokes were stupid—accusations of drunkenness, of impossible sexual feats, and he promised them insane punishments to be dealt out the moment the fighting was over. Men howled with laughter at a sentence of a thousand lashes for a crooked hair clasp, their hilarity just a little breathless, just a little loud. Noddy could smell the sharpness of fear in the air—they all could. But everyone worked hard to hide it.

  Last, they shoved bent arrows and sticks wrenched from the wagons down the backs of the straw men in order to hold up helms. And when it was done, and they led the remounts back behind the animals selected for the actual charges, the effect was surprisingly lifelike.

  The straw army was light enough to leave on the horses’ backs. Buckets of water from one of the many trickle-downs, carried from horse to horse, became the main job, as they waited for Hawkeye to tell them when.

  Jeje: we caught our first glimpse of the pass midafternoon. The unreal is becoming real—a thought yet unreal. Does that makes sense? Don’t answer that—weak joke—I know you won’t answer. Why?

  Tau sent the note and straightened as the others lined up along the extreme edge of the cliff edge, trusting to the screening effect of a tangle of firs. They ate journey bread and peered down into the distant canyon in the pass. Steep cliffs, yes, and narrow access. There were the Venn, marching in perfect order, winged helms on the commanders, the men with steel or brass horns the breadth of a palm at either side of their helms. Inda wondered what the symbolism of wings and horns were. Maybe the horns were practical, to catch downward striking blades?

  The question fled when he got a glimpse of the commander’s chest just before he rode out of sight. Was that an owl? This owl flew in the opposite direction of the silver owl of Inda’s own family, the Algara-Vayirs, but was that device green? The sun dazzle muted color.

  Is he some sort of relative from centuries ago? Inda felt as if he stood in some strange place outside of time hearing owl hooting to owl across the grassy plains of their ancestors.

  “We’ve got a long way to go,” Evred said.

  And they were in motion once again.

  Rattooth Cassad slammed the rough stable door open. “Venn’re coming back. Should be here midafternoon. Harbormaster’s following me,” he added, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

  Buck and Barend sat in the converted tack room that had served the Marlovans as their garrison headquarters, just outside Lindeth Harbor. The patrols had rotated in and out of Ala Larkadhe, half a day’s ride away, so—with wood a precious and increasingly rare commodity
after years of pirate incursions—the “garrison” had never been more than a barn made into a stable, the tack room doubling as a rudimentary office, with a few beds for injured men or for sleeping over during blizzards.

  Now the converted barn was the command post for Barend’s and Buck’s combined forces. The animals were all outside on guarded pickets, the stalls full of wounded men from the failed defense of the coast.

  They’d posted four rings of guards on the animals. Galloping horses could not be chased by men on foot, so they’d managed to get away clear, returning only after the Venn had all marched off to Ala Larkadhe.

  They’d faced the grim chore of crossing that wrecked, blood-blackened beach to gather their hacked-up wounded after the commanders Disappeared their dead. They sang the “Hymn to the Fallen” until their throats were raw, the men around them singing or humming with them.

  As the sun dropped below the sea they rode to the outskirts of Lindeth, the exhausted men and horses drinking from the streams swollen from the runoff up the mountain. Everyone was too tired to ask why the streams ran so high when there had been no rain for two days.

  They bedded down around the garrison outpost.

  At dawn, Rat had insisted on scouting himself. The other two agreed on the condition that he take a tough runner from each wing as backup.

  Now they were back, and Rat waved an ironic hand toward the open door, through which they could see a gaunt old man picking his way soberly through the lines of wounded stretched out on the hastily-swept floor. The worst hurt were inside, the ones who could manage to sit or move about had been put on the grassy hills with the rest of the camp.

  The harbormaster’s furrowed face seemed to age as he took in the number of wounded. He stopped just outside the tack room door, and the three commanders watched him run a knobby hand over his sparse hair.

  Then he drew in a deep breath. His scrawny chest expanded beneath the linen tunic that, like his dark robe, was part of his clothes of office.

  It took courage to face these martial young men in their blood-spattered gray coats. But he was desperate. “Don’t fight in my city,” he said in the slurred Iascan of the north. “Please,” he added, though more than half the angry people waiting back at his house had insisted he not beg the evil Marlovans.

  “Your? City?” Buck repeated, powerful arms crossed.

  Barend waved him off. “You’re in trouble whichever way you turn, Harbormaster.” He’d had several meetings with the man over the past year. The former guild mistress had been the Marlovans’ most determined enemy, but the harbormaster had deferred time and again to her in his attempts to find a middle ground between conquerors and the older inhabitants.

  Rat propped a foot up on a barrel and leaned his forearms on his knee, wriggling his shoulder blades to ease the pull of a long cut over his ribs on his back. “You really think they’ll leave you alone if you let ’em in?”

  The harbormaster said, “Do you think they’ll go on a killing spree, then, Marlovan?”

  Rat was indifferent to the sarcasm. “No. What they’ll do is boot you out of the few standing houses you’ve got, because they’re going to need space to bring in men and supplies for the second invasion next year. Though they might keep a few of you to work for ’em, but you’ll be living in your own barns.”

  “Invasion? Next year?” the man said, appalled.

  Buck snorted. “This here is just a welcome party. Next year they’re coming back. And not just with these fellows. They’ll bring more of ’em from the north. They need food, they need cloth, they need wood and steel, above all, they need workers and warriors. You’ll be the workers.” He jabbed his finger within a hair’s breadth of the old man’s chest. Then jerked his thumb at his own chest. “We’re supposed to be the warriors. The word is, they have some kind o’ magical spells that make your mind go blank, so they can run us clear to Sartor, and it’s you people who’ll be busy making the supplies.”

  The harbormaster stared, eyes distended. Then they narrowed, and his face flushed to the tips of his ears. “You’re lying, Marlovan.”

  “So you think we’re here watching our brethren die for the fun of it?”

  “That’s exactly what we thought,” the man said, though without the conviction he might have used before treading through that room outside. That and hearing at dawn a private report of the horror of the south shore. His breath hissed in and he rubbed his hands over his head again. “You’re protecting what you’ve already taken. And I suppose it’s understandable, and you’ve not used us unfairly. But no one wants you fighting in our streets, or worse, setting fire to the entire city just to keep ’em out. As it is, you’ve destroyed the docks.”

  “And who will have to pay for rebuilding it?” Barend retorted.

  Rat straightened up, wincing. Terrible fight yesterday, fast gallop this morning, the bandage was leaking. His coat was already ruined.

  But he grinned, his prominent front teeth making him look fierce. “What if we only seem to set fire to your city?”

  “What?”

  “What?”

  “Hah?”

  He lifted a hand toward the shore, trying not to pull the open wound on his back. “Still haven’t got all the fires out. Right? I saw smoke when riding in to report.”

  “That’s so,” the harbormaster said, adding dryly, “When you people set fire to something, you’re as thorough as the pirates ever were.”

  “Hey—” Buck began.

  Barend waggled a hand. “Never mind. What are you thinking, Cousin?”

  “That we keep those fires going,” Rat said. “From the ocean it’s got to look like the entire city’s aflame. Inda told us they have magic communications. That Venn mage o’ his said so.”

  “Venn mage?” the harbormaster repeated, wondering if that shocking rumor could be true after all.

  No one paid him any attention. Rat said, “Which means the fellows coming here got to see a burning city from this end, see?”

  “You mean, make it look like all of Lindeth’s gone up in flames?” Buck said, and whistled.

  “That’s it.” Rat turned to the harbormaster. “We’d need your cooperation. We have maybe a watch or so before they reach us. So it has to be now if we’re to do it.”

  Barend chuckled. “Oh, a watch ought to do it easily.” He did not say that he knew some pirate ruses for making fires look far worse than they were.

  The harbormaster huffed. “You won’t be setting fire to the city?”

  Barend raised his hand, palm out, in a gesture of promise. “You tend the fires yourselves. Just keep them going, lots of smoke, like I show you, and they won’t set foot in Lindeth.”

  “Ourselves?” the harbormaster said, bushy white brows raised. “What will you be doing?”

  “Riding over the white cliffs the back way. So when they turn around again to go upriver to the pass, well, they’ll get their own welcome party.”

  “You don’t have nearly enough men,” the harbormaster protested.

  Barend’s grin faded. Rat looked sardonic. Buck widened his eyes. “We don’t?”

  The harbormaster kept shaking his head all the way back to his house, now crowded with frightened faces.

  “We’ve got a plan,” he said.

  A thick cloud mass moved in on a strengthening wind. Just as the afternoon shadows began to lengthen the Venn smelled fire on the wind, and when they topped the highest hill before the gradual descent toward Lindeth Harbor, there was no harbor to be seen. Just a thunderhead of smoke over the entire city, glowing with flame.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  SIGNI woke before dawn. The headache was just a shade less murderous. She managed to rise and force her shaky legs to bear her out of the room and down the stairs. She stopped on the landing outside the archive, and felt the door. It was closed: she bowed her head, accepting judgment.

  She made her way slowly downstairs, trusting in the dim light and her rumpled, anonymous clothing to draw little at
tention. The few awake paid her no heed. They were too shocked, too weary, and wondering where to begin cleaning up the sodden remains of the city. Not one of the few people moving about the castle that morning noticed a small, sandy-haired woman of indeterminate origin.

  She drifted to the kitchen. In the light of a single lamp, she found less devastation than she’d feared. Certainly everything on ground level or below was ruined, but the water had left the bags, jars, and jugs on shelves above table height untouched, and tightly-made barrels had also survived.

  She helped herself to some heels of the day before’s bread and a hunk of cheese. She felt much better, enough to set to work. She was a sea dag. Most of her spells pertained to water in some way.

  The morning sun had crowned the distant hills and the summer air was hot enough to spoil wet things when her spells began to take effect. In a reversal of the calling spell she evaporated pools and puddles, compressed water out of wood and cloth, sending it all back to the underground river. The dank smell diminished, leaving dry detritus for the citizens to clean up.

  Signi found her way to the lazaretto. Her second set of skills was in healing. She knew she would be needed that day.

  Hilda Battle Chief (newly promoted) Vringir’s mood was vile when the sun came up. Overhead a blanket of low clouds promised stifling air later; it already smelled of smoke drifting from the still-burning city.

  The thud of horse hooves caused his head to pang. All night long horsemen had attacked his camp: a flurry of galloping hooves and arrows, then they dashed away into the darkness. The Marlovans were far too fast to chase even if he’d had enough horses.

  He issued the command to rouse the camp. The second half of the landing party had been ordered to share out their journey bread, which had been meant to get them through the first day. Instead, half rations would have to suffice until his scouting parties could gather food from the countryside and meet up with them.