by Sarah Zettel
The call came again, faint but clear on the cold night wind.
God and Christ, I’m losing my mind.
But the call came again, down the gentle slope outside the hall’s defenses, to the west, she thought, although it was hard to tell. Risa hesitated for a handful of heartbeats, and then, murmuring a far different set of prayers, ran back to the chapel.
Gawain was still there, and still kneeling before the altar.
She called his name and he turned on his knees as if he’d heard a sword being drawn.
“Risa …” he went utterly pale at the sight of her. There was no time to let him speak another word, and Risa found secretly glad.
“Gawain. I heard a raven out by the walls.”
The confusion on Gawain’s face quickly cleared, and he leapt to his feet. “Did you see anything?”
“No, but … I do not like it. Will you come with me?”
Risa realized she was placing a trust in Gawain. They had both seen what they had seen, and knew that hidden arts and powers worked around them. He could deny it, though. It would be difficult to explain to Bannain why he was going out in the dark to chase a bird.
But Gawain wasted no time on questioning her eyes or intuitions.
“I will get my arms. Fetch your bow and meet me at the hall doors.”
Risa nodded and hurried down the corridor. She burst into the sleeping room, sending a flock of women and ladies of the hall fluttering from her path.
“Where are you going, Lady?” asked a sly, cultured voice as Risa caught up her bow and quiver from under her bed.
“Hunting larks,” she answered sharply and left before any other query could follow.
Gawain stood ready by the hall steps, watching the darkness alertly. The sentries moved with steady strides around the inner palisades. Torches and rushlights flared, driving the dark back just a little.
As soon as Risa descended the steps, Gawain nodded, and side-by-side they crossed the yard.
The guard on the portal beside the inner gate was clearly loath to let them leave, but was, fortunately, even more reluctant to closely question the lord-and-hero Gawain, and they were allowed out with only a minimal delay. Beyond the inner walls, night turned Pen Marhas into a maze. Although the moon was high, there was not enough light pick out any more than the roughest of shapes. Risa strained her ears. Random noises — the bleating of a sheep, a pig’s grunt — drifted on the wind along with the smells of wood smoke, animal pens and faintly, of the dead still unburied beyond the walls. It was as impossible to tell the direction of any one sound as it was the origin of any one scent. Risa wished in vain that she had her hounds for this strange hunt.
Gawain matched her pace exactly, moving with caution and grace at her side, always taking care not to step in front of her and so always leaving a clear path for her to shoot the arrow she held ready in the string. She had only three left. They could not afford to waste even one chance for a shot at their prey.
The torches atop the outer walls grew closer, but only slowly. A man’s voice called out. A dog barked. Nothing more or less than the sounds of a town’s night.
“Did I dream?” muttered Risa.
“We will make sure all is right at the outer walls,” answered Gawain. “I’ll take caution at even a dream of yours.”
Risa concentrated on the sounds beyond the silver-tinged shadows. A baby’s high, thin wail. A cow’s lowing. A door. Footsteps stumbling on rutted dirt. A long, low creaking, as of something heavy being slowly moved.
Gawain stopped dead. “God on High. The gate. Risa, run, wake the hall!”
The gate. The Saxons were opening the gate. Risa jammed her arrow into her quiver as she took off running, slipping and splashing in mud-rimmed puddles.
“The gate!” she shouted as she ran. “The gate is open! The walls are breeched!”
Voices raised around her, calling out from houses. Doors slammed open, and hastily kindled lights bobbed out into the night. Risa did not slow or stop to make any answer. She just sent her warning as far ahead as she could
“The gate is open! The walls are breeched!”
Behind her, the screams began, and the roar of maddened men. It was then she realized she was alone in her flight. Gawain had stayed behind.
As clear as day, her mind’s eye saw him standing in the street, bellowing orders to the sentries, sword in hand, ready to meet the enemy’s tide. Her voice choked off, but her speed redoubled.
The inner walls blocked the way in front of her. The light from blazing torches cascaded down.
“Who …!” began the sentry, his voice tight and uncertain.
“Lady Risa!” she cried back before he could finish his question. “Let me in! The Saxons have breeched the gate!”
The sentry overhead did not move. He was only a frightened boy. But someone had some presence of mind; the little portal beside the gates was flung and Risa darted inside.
“Is the thedu awake?” she bawled at the man who stood nearest the door.
“He’s been sent for …”
She did not wait to hear any more. She just ran for the stables, her breath tearing at her lungs like sobs. Around her, men ran as well, for the horses, for the walls, for their weapons or their wives. Their voices blended into an incomprehensible din. Firelight chased back the darkness. Over the walls, the sky began to glow, and a new, ominous roar began under the shouts and clatters.
A woman screamed.
The stable doors were wide open. Boys and men rushed past her, arms loaded with tack and saddles. Risa waded between them to Thetis’s box. Gringolet might throw her, but Thetis knew her touch from when she was a little girl, and when she was a little girl she had ridden in the oldest style of all. Risa seized Thetis’s mane, hauled herself up onto the mare’s bare back and dug her knees into the horse’s sides, sending her flying out into the yard. People threw themselves out of her way, and cried out what might have been curses. Risa threw her weight backward to pull Thetis up short as they reached the wall.
The man was the same who had let her in, and he did not waste time asking what she thought she was doing
“My lady, the Saxons …!” he tried.
“Lord Gawain is out there alone!” she cut him off. “Open that door and bring who you can behind me!”
Thankfully, the man obeyed. Risa threw herself flat against Thetis’s back and a lifetime of loyalty caused the mare to respond when Risa with rough heels and hands ordered her through the narrow door and down the twisting street.
In the time it had taken for Risa to run to the hall, the night of Pen Marhas had changed completely. Now it was filled with noise and horror on all sides. Fire clawed at the sky from thatched roofs. Screams blossomed with the flames, women’s and children’s terror mixed together. Men’s impotent shouts. Cruel laughter in answer. The stink of burning flesh and the mindless cries of animals. Bodies swarmed through the street, running in utter desperation for the hall and the inner walls, knowing that they might not make it in time, knowing that they might be trapped between the Saxons and the closed gates.
Thetis balked and bucked. Risa had finally asked too much of her. She knotted her hands in the horse’s mane, but there was no controlling her. She wheeled around, and Risa felt herself begin to slip. It was either jump off or be thrown.
She landed on the rutted ground, stumbling before she found her balance. Relieved of her burden, Thetis bolted into the chaos, leaving Risa to hope she found some kind of safety for herself.
She had no idea where she was. All the walls around her looked identical. Faceless forms ran past her, bumping and jostling. She made her way against their current. Gawain would have headed to the walls. His first priority would have been to try to get the gates closed.
Risa’s hand gripped her bow where it hung on her shoulder. It was useless in this flickering light, these uncertain shadows, but it gave her strength to keep going, hugging the shadows, trying to think clearly, trying to shut out the screams
and the heat of the fires.
“Risa!”
Risa’s head jerked up. Without warning, a man’s hands seized her about the waist, jerking her off her feet, hurling her to the ground. Her head slammed against the dirt, and for a moment she saw the Saxon towering over her, firelight turning his knife and helm blood red. Risa scrabbled at the ground for some weapon, any weapon, and the Saxon swooped down.
Then there was the flash of a blade, and a guttural scream, and the Saxon was gone, replaced by Gawain’s silhouette. He grabbed Risa by the arm, hauling her upright. Before she could find her feet, he dragged her through the nearest doorway.
The house had already known the attention of the raiders. The furniture was smashed, the folk fled, the fire flung from the hearth, its flames smoldering in the middle of the dirt floor. Gawain ground them out with the heel of his boot.
“What were you thinking?” he demanded, stamping out the last of the fledgling fires.
That you were out here alone. But he knew that. How could he not know? She kept her silence and tried to find her breath again. Gawain stared for a moment at the ashes, and then turned to her. His heart was all in his eyes, and Risa felt her own reach out in answer. All that they had not said, all that they had tried to keep from each other, passed between them now, with nothing more than that look while Hell opened all around them. They could not lie now, to each other or themselves, as they might have tried to once.
“Forgive me,” he whispered.
Risa swallowed. “There is nothing to forgive.”
“There is. I would tell you if there was time. We need to head for the outer walls. If we stay here, the fire will take us, even if the Saxons don’t.”
She thought about the mad scramble at the hall for men and weapons. “Bannain …?”
“We cannot help them if we’re burning with his town. The outer gates are still open.”
Fresh screams rose from the chaos. Gawain grabbed Risa’s arm, pulling her through the doorway. The screams grew closer, accompanied by the sounds of weeping, and of laughter.
It was a cluster of women and children surrounded by Saxons who drove them with kicks and axe hafts against their backs. One had a woman by her hair, dragging her behind him so that she had to run to keep from falling. Her captor ignored her screams, or perhaps he enjoyed them. Gawain let go of Risa’s arm at once, and stood before them.
He was going to say something, offer some challenge, for he was a captain and a champion, or perhaps because he couldn’t see straight yet from the smoke. Risa snatched up a piece of wood, some post from a broken fence, and charged like a mad woman for the nearest raider, screaming at the top of her lungs.
Caught off guard, the raider swung around too late and Risa drove her fence post into his belly, knocking him off his feet. The women screamed and scattered. Gawain swung his sword, parrying another raider’s axe, thrusting at throat and belly. Risa whirled around in time to see a raider with his knife out bearing down on her, but in the next heartbeat he saw she was not standing alone. There had been no time to tie the women, and they were not going to simply flee. They came back, with sticks and rocks, with bare hands and screams and flaming brands. The raiders fell before them, tumbling into the mud to be kicked and beaten, or driven back between the burning homes. The children cried and screamed, the youngest huddling behind the oldest. A few picked up stones and threw them after the fleeing Saxons.
Gawain dispatched his man and turned to look for more, but saw only women and children, and Risa standing there, clutching her makeshift weapon, and breathing lungfuls of smoke until each breath was a cough.
“Risa, take them out of here!” he shouted to be heard above the roar.
“There’s no shelter out there!”
“There’s less in here! Get the children away!”
Come with me! she wanted to cry to him, or I won’t leave you! but she did not. He was armed with steel and she with a stick of wood. Her bow was useless in this hideous light and the shifting winds the fires created. He could do far more in here that she. The poets could fill in the grand gestures later.
“Hold onto each other!” She caught up the hand of the nearest woman. “Keep close! We’re going to the gates!”
They came by ones and twos, mothers carrying babies, clusters of children, old men hoisting their grandchildren onto their bent backs. They clutched at sleeves and hands, stumbling through the inferno their home had become, coughing and retching. Risa tried not to look at any of them, she tried only to see the way out. Her right hand curled tightly around her ridiculous stick, but it was all she had.
At last, the gates of Pen Marhas opened before them like the gates of Paradise itself. A gout of clean, cold wind caught Risa in the face and she thought she would faint from the giddy delight of it. She slogged forward with her charges. There was no one left on the earthworks. There was no one left in the field. The Saxons had all gone in to sack the town. The soldiers had all gone in to defend it.
And here they were, this ragged band, to watch it burn.
“We should get up above it,” said Risa. Smoke and emotion turned her voice hoarse.
Numbly they followed her, across the valley and up the hillside. One of the women knew where there was a spring, and she led them into the gully where the water ran clean and cold as ice, chattering to itself as if nothing were happening. They all drank. The women washed their children’s faces, and soaked their burns in the icy water, wrapping them in pieces of sleeve and skirt that one of the men cut free with his knife.
Then, because there was nothing else to do, they sat on the hillside, huddled close for what little warmth there was to be had from each other, and watched Pen Marhas burn. Children crawled into their mothers’ and grandfathers’ laps, or leaned their heads against their knees. Those who had no parent with them crowded together beside their neighbors. Risa wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. She tried to be grateful for her life, for the lives of those around her, for the small blessing that they were upwind from the town, so they did not have to breathe the stench of it into their ravaged lungs. Her skin stung in a dozen places, as if she had been in a swarm of bees, and her throat was raw with smoke and shouting. Despite the heat of the other bodies around her, she was cold.
Down below, fire leapt to the sky, but it had not yet reached the center of the stronghold. The hall itself did not burn, she thought, she hoped, she prayed. She could make herself believe while the hall still stood that there was some haven for Gawain to retreat to. That there was some chance for him.
It took Risa a long moment to realize it was not just fire that lit the sky. White sunlight turned the horizon pale. Dawn was coming.
“Look there.” The woman whispered, as if afraid of being overheard.
And maybe she was. A stream of bodies was fleeing Pen Marhas. Caught between fire and dawn light, all were black silhouettes. It was impossible to tell who they were, or whether some chased others or they all fled the fires in camaraderie. Risa leapt to her feet, straining her eyes and ears for some sign. Then she heard the shouts of triumph from below. They bounced off the hills, harsh, incomprehensible.
Saxon.
Despair clamped onto Risa’s heart. What was she to do now? Where were they to go? Had the Saxons taken the hall or were they just fleeing with their loot? Even so, they’d be combing the hills for the survivors. There was no place to go, and here she was caught with the women and children, and only a handful of arrows, to be pressed into slavery or worse …
She turned to them. They looked at her, some wide-eyed, some skeptical. They knew her rank, but would they listen? Would they help? They had to flee. They had to try. Oh, Gawain.
Before she could open her mouth, a new sound wafted over the hills, so unexpected it took a moment for Risa to understand what it was. The notes of a hunting horn, bright and brave rose to meet the dawn. It blew again, its notes winging over the sound of fire and the raider’s cheers.
Once more, a river poure
d over the eastern hills and down the broad road, a cascade of men and horses, flashing all the colors of the rainbow and more; brown and white, green and blue, silver and gold, riding close in tight discipline. A red and gold banner led them all. The Pendragon, broad and bright, unfurled beneath the bloody light of the rising sun. The messengers had reached Camelot, and Camelot had answered.
“Camelot!” cried Risa. “The king! The king!”
The exhausted women took up the cry, their jubilation ringing out like the notes of the horn that led the charge. They lifted their children high so that they could see their salvation racing toward Pen Marhas.
For now it was the Saxons who would be trapped. If the hall had held out. If the inner gates had stayed shut. If Gawain had been able to hold the men together …
If Gawain was still alive.
The fresh cascade broke against Pen Marhas. Some turned to follow the now fleeing Saxons, riding them down easily. Men on horseback took up positions outside the earthworks, guarding the way out. Others dismounted, leaving their horses in the charge of their fellows and went into the town on foot to deal with what they found there. The clash of steel, shouts of command and shouts of fear overpowered the sounds of the fire and looting.
“Should we go down?” murmured a woman behind her. “Can we go home?”
“Nay, wait,” answered an old man. “There’s work for the knights awhile yet.”
The sun climbed up over the hills. Every so often, a cluster of men ran out from the gates, to be taken up or cut down by the sentries. Risa’s hands itched for her bow. Her feet wanted to run down, to search the fires and the ashes for Gawain. At the same time, she wanted nothing more than to sink into sleep. Her eyes seemed to have forgotten how to blink. The whole of her body ached with exhaustion, cold and long waiting.
The day warmed. It seemed it had been a long time since any raiders had tried to break free of the town. The fires grew old, sinking back into themselves, their rage softening to sighs. Risa noticed something odd. She had not seen one raven the whole long morning. Not a single bird circled the battlefield.
