“What do you need those for?” Kuljin asked.
“We’re going back to Holdberg. We’re going to break the siege with them.”
They plodded on through the snow, remaining in the tracks of the Sparli patrol, and as Levin had thought, the tracks turned from the main road in the direction of Holdberg. Kuljin had studied the map that Fyella had drawn in the dust two days earlier, and he moved his pony up to come abreast of Levin. “You were right, they were from Holdberg. You think they were looking for us?”
Levin nodded. “Most likely. And double lucky that they never found us. I know that little farm was out of the way, but still, they should have found us. I don’t understand why they didn’t.”
“Maybe they didn’t have the men. We are far from the front lines of this conquest or invasion or whatever you want to call it. This is land they think they control, and they’ve killed or driven off everyone that was here. Probably most of them are either standing siege, like at Holdberg, or fighting south of here.”
“Well, I hope they have as few men at Holdberg as I think they do.”
“How do you mean to break the siege there?”
“Watch and see.” He told Kuljin.
For the rest of the day they plodded on toward Holdberg, and when the terrain began to look familiar, Levin led them off of the main road and into a series of lanes and hidden cartpaths, keeping constant watch for any sign of the Sparli. Either there were as few Sparli as Kuljin thought or they were very lucky, for they only saw one patrol, a group of perhaps ten Sparli, and those were a long way off. They hid among the hedgerows until the patrol passed. When they finally reached the hill that was Levin’s destination, he explained his plan to them, and all but Kuljin agreed it must be done.
“Now what are they about?” Jimmin Tailor asked Kam O’Goldenrod as he looked out from between the merlons on Holdberg’s high wall. It was coming on sunset, and the brightness of the day on the new snow was fading quickly. Somewhere out there at the tree lines the Auligs were patiently waiting, but the survivors of besieged Holdberg were no longer attempting to escape. They waited instead for rescue, for the black pox had devastated them, killing more than half of their number. All along the line of trees the bodies of Mortentians stood impaled upon spears, a grim reminder from the Auligs of the fate that awaited any who tried to escape the town.
“What? What are you talking about?” Kam asked Jimmin, for he’d gone deaf in one ear with the pox, and his attention span had never really been that great to begin with. He was barely a week into his recovery.
“The Auligs.” Jimmin said. “Up on that hill. Have a look.”
Together the two watchmen gazed at the hill, where five large wooden poles were being placed in the ground. The hill was nearly half a league off, way back from the Aulig lines and out of sight from them, and the Auligs there were only barely visible. The Auligs hung something from the poles on crosspieces, like banners flapping in the wind. Kam shook his head. “Damned if I know what that is. Some kind of flags, maybe?”
“Go get the captain. He has a far-seeing glass. I’ve a suspicion about them flags.” Jimmin’s eyes, keener than Kam’s, had grown hard and dark. A muscle in his cheek had begun to twitch.
Captain Huskik came up shortly, limping slightly with the stiffness that had been his gift from the pox. He was in full armor and carrying his far-glass. The things weren’t uncommon in Northcraven Duchy, for many former mariners used them. “What is it, Jimmin? What do you see?”
“Have a look, captain. Tell me that’s not what I think it is.” He pointed at the flags on the hill.
“Sons of whores.” The captain replied after taking a look. “They’ve killed gravediggers. But why would they display their sin so brazenly? Usually they hang the bodies, not the clothing. There is a riddle here. Jimmin fetch the lord mayor. Sorry, the acting lord Mayor. I keep forgetting that Harbridger’s dead.”
Acting Lord Mayor Roros Wellveris arrived at the wall a few minutes later, when it was coming on dark. He looked through the far-glass at the distant hill, and he saw the robes of the dead gravediggers flapping in the evening breeze. They were quite distinct against the snow, and through the far-glass the rents and blood stains on the cloaks were plain. “Tis an affront to the Light, but one I think we were meant to see.” The lord mayor declared.
“Meant to see?”
“Aye. Look at where they’ve placed them. So far behind the Sparli that I doubt they can see them. I think this is a message from someone else.”
“But a message saying what?”
“A message saying that these Sparli will stick at nothing, for one thing. A message telling us that if they are willing to do this thing, then we are all dead men if we do nothing.” His voice was still rough from the pox, for he’d only been out of his sickbed for a week. “Call the captains together. The pox was one thing, but this is another. In fact, call the whole town up.”
Every bow, spear, sword, hammer and pruning hook in Holdberg was fetched from its place. Every hand capable of striking was filled. Not one person in the little town had any longer any thought of siege or even of defense, for their actions were now the work of Lio, or in the case of some, Lio and the rest of the gods.
Wellveris spoke to them in the town’s market square, and they all fit within it, shivering with cold as night came on. There were no more than five hundred adults assembled, but women and men both had come with weapons in their hands. Many of them were still weak and sick, and the pox had half-blinded a few as well. “Listen, good people, you have all by now heard about the banners that have been hung yonder. This is someone telling us that we must act, and that there will be help if we do. Aside from that, those were gravediggers, and this is no longer a matter of war or strategy. We ask the gods to bless our work, for we do their ancient will tonight.
“Some of us may die doing this work, or perhaps all of us if I am wrong, but this is our duty. The Auligs have done what all law forbids, so fill your hands. We will strike when the moon rises.”
A dozen horses were brought forth, all that were left in Holdberg, even the ones whose owners had hidden them away to avoid losing them to the town’s hunger. They were saddled quickly, and soldiers trained in horsemanship placed upon them with spears and swords.
When the moon’s bright crescent rose above the eastern horizon and the light from it bathed all of that snow-covered land, the gate of Holdberg was opened, and all of the people came forth, walking with long and certain strides. No horns blew, no war cries broke the night’s stillness, and no commands were needed. This was the work of the gods they were doing, and each of them followed his own conscience. Not a single able-bodied man remained behind the walls, and only so few of the women as were needed to watch the town’s children. Their feet crisply parted the crust of snow as they walked.
The host from the town was half way to the tree line before the amazed Sparli scouts discovered it, for the town had been quiet for a long time and their diligence had waned. Even as the Sparli blew the alarum horns, cried out and assembled, the people came forth, with perhaps a dozen ill-armed horsemen riding swiftly at their head.
Poghra was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of ram’s horns blowing the alarum. The vitya who commanded his squad began issuing orders. “Assemble quickly.” He told them, his voice exultant. “The town’s folk are attempting a sortie.”
“A sortie?” Heavy Hands was practically laughing. “Have they gone mad?”
“It matters not what lies behind it.” The vitya said, sharing Heavy Hand’s mirth. “They’ve left the gate open and the town is ours! Get your gear on swiftly, men. We will cut them off and break them. Even you, Poghra. Your goddess seems to have abandoned them.”
Poghra leaped to his feet to obey. He had been humiliated in front of the others when he returned from the fight at the church with his warning about the Mistress of Plagues, chastised for his cowardice and punished. The vitya told him that if he’d had a decent
name, he would have been stripped of it for either his lack of courage or his stupidity in falling for the Mortentians’ ruse in playing the part of the goddess. He swiftly donned his armor and sword, only recently restored to him, and ran from the tent into the night.
Like all of the Sparli, he feared to fight in the night, but he did not fear the Mortentians. Not yet, anyway.
The vitya was assembling his squad in the field before the tents, and in the shadow of impaled Mortentians they quickly formed into a square of ten. Shields and spears bristled from their formation. Meanwhile the score of horse-archers formed a line and began trotting behind the fifteen heavily armored vityas. “We will break them and send them scurrying back to their town.” Declared the vitya. “But they will never make it. We will cut them down in the field when they run.”
Poghra saw the Mortentians clearly now, for they were less than a hundred paces distant, a disorganized mass of perhaps five hundred people walking without armor or any kind of defensive formations, with a line of horses at their front. The vityas laughed as they couched their lances.
“They aren’t proper soldiers at all.” His vitya said. “Let us show them what a battle looks like before we kill them all. Archers! Loose!”
The horse archers and a dozen archers on the ground quickly sent a flight of arrows into the advancing Mortentians, and everywhere an arrow was sent, a Mortentian fell, but they did not break or even slow down, marching with their mouths tight and determined faces. Fully half of the Mortentian horsemen fell.
“Break them!” Shouted the vitya, and the armored knights of the Sparli began a charge in a tight phalanx, the kind of charge no infantry could hope to stand against. Poghra marched forward with his squad of foot, and two other squads marched beside them, shields in a tight box.
But seconds before the horses of the vityas slammed into the silent Mortentian mob, a voice rang out from the night beyond, and rather than break, the Mortentians at the front of their pseudo formation, the largest and best armed of them, surged forward, running across the snow to meet the charge headlong. Several of them fell, taking lances at full charge, and in many cases the lances killed not only the ones at the front, but the ones in the rank behind them.
But still the mob did not break, nor did it even slow, and on the wings of the mob men ran forward with spears, pruning hooks and even rakes and scythes, surrounding the knights even as they attempted to reform for another charge. Poghra watched in horror as the Mortentians surged around each of the vityas and pulled them down, killing the horses as they did so.
Many of the townsfolk were trampled by horses or killed by the vityas who unlimbered their swords and hacked at them, but still they did not break. The sheer mass of their bodies was enough to stop the charge, and the knights went down amid the crowd and did not again rise.
The horse archers backed up expertly to loose another volley into the Mortentians, but although many in their front lines fell, the people behind came grimly on, moving even more swiftly than before. They ran through the snow recklessly, hurling themselves against Poghra’s shield wall. Poghra struck a big bearded fellow and a woman with white-looking hair who might have been a grandmother, killing them easily, but another man grabbed Poghra’s feet as he fell, and two more men, careless of his blade, grabbed his shield and pulled him forward with it.
Beside him other Sparli fought expertly, slamming their shields into the Mortentians, but they surged forward anyway, climbing over the bodies of their friends and neighbors to hurl themselves onto the infantry formations, falling and dying amid a storm of arrows. Poghra found himself letting go of his shield and backing up into the men behind him. A girl of no more than thirteen launched herself at him, threw her arms around his sword arm, and the mob dragged him down into the snow.
A knife or spear, Poghra didn’t know which, was driven through his armor with a great force behind it, and into his chest. He coughed and for a last moment wished he’d never come to this land.
Jimmin Tailor stood behind the mob with his bow nocked, looking for another Aulig horse-archer. Already he had shot three of their horses, for although all of these Auligs wore armor, only the horses of their knights had been barded. He spotted one backing his horse and loosing an arrow into the mob from Holdberg, and he shot the archer’s horse in the neck. The horse screamed and began to buck wildly, and the archer called out something to the others in their language as he fell to the ground. Another horse-archer came riding up with a remount for the man, and the Aulig horse-archers rode back into the trees, loosing arrows behind them as they rode.
The Aulig knights had all fallen, and their infantry had broken and run, but the horse-archers were a different proposition. The horse-archers were very skilled, and they could loose arrows while moving too fast for the Mortentians to catch them. They formed up into a loose line and began riding in a wide circle around the Holdberg mob, and they killed the Mortentian horses first, so that they could not be caught.
Jimmin realized that the mob, who now numbered probably no more than four hundred, would soon be slaughtered in the bloody field, shot down by an enemy they could not touch. But they had done their duty by the gods, and if that meant they all must die, so be it. He wondered at the voice that had called from the night, a Mortentian telling them to charge.
Suddenly another force of men entered into the battle. Swiftly ridden horses came out of the darkness, and Jimmin watched a large man in chain mail, his blond hair flowing from beneath a steel cap, reach out with a sword and take one of the Aulig horse-archers from his saddle. He was riding an Aulig pony. Another man in chainmail, this one sporting an eye-patch, stabbed the Aulig who was about to shoot down his companion, and yet another began shooting arrows into the Aulig horse-archers. Jimmin knew the man, despite his Aulig clothes, for it was Antor Appleman, who had tried to escape Holdberg a month earlier.
From the darkness came more arrows, but all of the people there had been fighting by torchlight, so they had no night vision to tell them how many people had come to help the men of Holdberg.
The charge from the darkness split the Aulig ring of archers, and they rode about in some confusion. Jimmin shot the horse out from under one of them, a tall Aulig in sewn together plates of iron who looked to have been a commander or something. The mob caught him and dragged him down beneath them.
When he fell the Auligs broke, for they had no way of knowing how many enemies lurked in the night, and the sudden appearance of the charging horsemen unnerved them. For a minute there was the sound of some pursuit, but not for very long, and most of the Aulig horse-archers were able to escape into the night.
Meanwhile the people of Holdberg went among the Aulig tents, looting them for weapons, food or any other useful things, then setting them on fire. The mob marched grimly along the treeline, seeking out any Auligs who might have chosen to remain, but they were gone. A wide circle of loosely placed tents burned into the night, casting the snowy field around Holdberg into flickering orange relief.
Jimmin watched as the two horsemen returned, and the one with the eyepatch spoke to the mob. His voice was raspy and harsh. “I am Levin Ghoulslayer, and I killed twenty ghouls on Damrek Island.” He said by way of introduction, and Jimmin could see in the light of the burning tents that his face was a ruin, and that only half of his mouth moved when he talked. “Who is in charge here?”
Chapter 86: The Sally’s High Touch, Northcraven Harbor and Points North and East, Latter Leath
When the snow began to fall seriously, Coril Jemms left his little nest in the rigging and climbed down wearily, for he was weary all the time now. He was as thin as a yard-arm, he knew, and not a scrap of fat left on his body. Quarter-rations wasn’t enough to keep him fed proper, nor any of the other men, and he was tired of the taste of fish.
The men were all tired, and hope had flown from the Touch, for all knew the death that the snow presaged. The river would freeze, the cannibals would board them, and there would be a bitter fight that
would end only when they were all dead and in the cookpot. Or perhaps the Auligs would come across the ice, which was just half-dozen of the other, as the saying went.
But when Coril stepped into the galley to see if there was a boiled fish head he could suck the flesh from, perhaps, the atmosphere was anything but hopeless. The entire crew was there, standing or sitting eagerly around a table where Captain Berrol sat, nodding at something the mate had just told him. He looked up and saw Coril.
“Ah, Jemms. Glad you’re here. That makes everyone.”
“About time you come down out of the rigging, boy.” Meade declared. “Thought I was going to have to come and unstick you from the ropes, little snowman.” Coril noted the big man had armed himself with a boarding cutlass, as had most of the others.
“What’s happening?”
“It’s this blizzard.” The captain said. “It’s just a snowfall now, but I’ve had a look about, and all the weather signs are there. This is the first big fall of winter, Jemms. There’ll be a wind and storm behind it.”
“We’re breaking out.” Eldrian Cane added. “Under cover of the storm, we’re going to make a run for it.” The once pot-bellied cook was now as thin as the rest of them, and the lines in his face looked deeper above his silvery beard. There was an eager light in his eye.
“But the Auligs, sir. They’ll still be there.”
“Aye, I suppose they will, Jemms. But not likely to be able to see us, once this storm gets really blowing.” The captain explained. “They’ll be under cover in tents or whatnot, I’m sure. Our sails are the same color as the snow, and once they see us it will take them hours to get men into their damned canoes, and with the wind I feel coming, we should be past them before they can stop us. If not, there’s the touch for them as get in front of us early enough. The river’s been flowing strong the past couple of days, and I don’t doubt that any logs they’ve put in the water will be washed up to the North Sea, and so will we be.”
War of the Misread Augury: Book One of the Black Griffin Rising Trilogy Page 114
