by Tim Stead
All eyes now turned to Major Tragil who stood upon the walls above him. Tragil was now the commander of the Berashi soldiers here, and Coyan’s proclamation meant nothing without Tragil, but as Arbak watched Tragil drew his own sword and turned the hilt towards him.
“I, too, declare for General Arbak,” he said. “In this battle I give my life and sword, and also my wall, to him.”
The silence was banished again by a great roar. Men shouted and stamped their feet, they hammered their swords into their shields, and through the noise he could hear them chanting: “Truth! Narak! Afael! Fal Verdan!”
He had never heard of anyone becoming general by acclamation, at least not in living memory, and it filled him with both pride and fear. Never the less, the rite had been spoken, simple as it was, and he had the title: General Arbak. It was not something that he had wanted or expected. It was a greater height from which to fall. He looked at Tragil and raised an eyebrow.
“Your wall?” he asked.
“It is all I have,” Tragil said. “It is all that matters.”
“You have stirred them up,” Coyan said. “General.”
“I wish you had not acclaimed me,” Arbak said. “It may not sit well with the powers in Avilian.”
“They do not matter,” Coyan said. “This is all that matters. This day, this wall, this battle.”
Tragil nodded. “Ten thousand is a great army,” he said.
“May I intrude?” Pascha stood on the wall beside Tragil. Arbak would have sworn that she had not been there a moment before. There was more than a hint of sarcasm in her voice.
“Deus, there is no intrusion,” Arbak bowed.
“They come,” she said.
It was true. Arbak and Coyan climbed the last of the steps and saw for themselves. The Army of Seth Yarra had arrived. They marched in good order into the dead ground before the gate, rank after rank, green and black banners fluttering in the cold breeze. It was uncannily similar to Arbak’s dream, and he glanced to both sides, but this time he saw grim faced men with bows, arrows already on the string.
So much for dreams.
The remainder of the day was strange. The Seth Yarra army arrayed itself before the gate, at what might have been considered a safe distance. They were beyond bowshot for any of the men on the wall, but Pascha, the sparrow, lord of the air, had retaken her seat high on the mountain. No sooner had they ordered themselves than an arrow fell from on high and the black clad officer who stood at the head of the column folded over.
For twenty minutes there was panic. Arrows fell unerringly among the officers, and by the time they had reformed their ranks in the forest fringe where she could not touch them, twenty-three black shrouded bodies lay on the killing ground.
That was a victory in itself, Arbak reflected.
Their next move was also unexpected. There was a conversation between the Seth Yarra officers and the Telans who had retreated the previous day, but the Seth Yarra did not appear to heed any warnings they might have received. There was great industry in the forest, and the soldiers emerged bearing the remains of several trees. They had felled them, limbed them and bound them into a formidable battering ram. They meant to try the gate.
“They mean to try the gate,” Tragil said. Arbak could hear the amused disbelief in his voice. Tragil knew, and Arbak knew that the outer gate would fall to such an assault. But that was the point. Behind the outer gate was the great stone – a stone that the Telans had not been able to damage in the days that they had held the pass unopposed. It was a waste of effort.
“Now you see what store they set by their allies,” Arbak said. “They have been told that the gate will not break – the Telans know it well enough – but they do not believe.”
It was all time, and time was good.
The ram was brought forwards beneath a canopy of shields. The soldiers held them high and to the side, but such canopies are imperfect, and arrows threaded the gaps between the shields. Men fell.
Tragil had oil up on the fighting platform again, and men stood above the gate with iron cauldrons, sheltering from the flights of Seth Yarra arrows that occasionally swept the battlements. Arbak crouched on one knee next to him. He admired Tragil’s patience, and his lack of emotion. Sheyani was not playing, but for now it did not matter. The gate would not fall; the men were full of confidence.
They all felt the crash as the ram struck the gate for the first time. Tragil raised his hand and looked at the men with the oil. They shifted their weight, preparing to lift their burden. A man a few paces away lit a torch from the fire in the tower and crouched, looking at Tragil expectantly.
The ram struck a second time. Still he made no signal. One of the Berashi archers fell from the wall – the first to die. His comrades responded with a volley, some risking putting their bodies above the wall to shoot down at the ram.
A third blow shivered the wall, and Tragil dropped his hand. Men strained and the cauldron tipped, spraying oil over the first ten ranks of men, wetting the shields and the ram alike. The man with the torch moved a second later, throwing it down among them with force.
For a moment the explosion of flames topped the wall. Arbak saw the yellow tongues licking at the stone, dark smoke whipping up into the sky and disappearing into the shimmer of heat. The screams followed a moment later as men realised they were on fire, as pain overcame discipline. Arbak couldn’t see it. He was still crouched behind the wall, but he had a good imagination – a curse for a soldier, he had always thought – and allowed others to risk Seth Yarra shafts to view the carnage.
“The ram is burning,” Tragil said. He sounded satisfied. “So is the gate. I wonder if they will try again.” He signalled his men, and they climbed awkwardly down the tall steps with the cauldron, going to fetch more oil in case it was needed. The number of Seth Yarra arrows increased for a brief while, whistling and clattering angrily against the stone, but the men kept their heads down and the volleys had little effect.
Their own archers shot with greater success. The Seth Yarra men had advanced to loose their shafts. They were within range and unprotected. Many died before they abandoned the unequal contest, turned and scrambled back towards the tree line.
“Collect their arrows,” Arbak called down to the men who crowded beneath the wall. Many Seth Yarra arrows lay on the ground behind the gate. Some of the shafts were broken, but he could see a great number that remained intact. There was no reason that they could not be used by his own archers to defend the wall.
The first of many pauses in the battle gave them all a moment to rest. Arbak climbed down the stairs. He was serving no useful purpose on the wall. Indeed, he was striving to find any purpose that he might serve. He could not shoot a bow, could barely wield a blade, and Tragil was quite expert in the defence of his position. He found Coyan among his men, talking to Sheyani. All the men looked impatient for battle to be joined. They fingered the hilts of their blades; they looked at the recently sounded gate. He understood. Waiting was worse than fighting. There was no worry when blades were drawn, blood spilt. You did what you could and you lived or died. Waiting was harder.
“Will they come soon, Sheshay?” she asked, her words echoing the mind of every man. He shook his head.
“They came expecting the gate to be in the hands of allies. They are unprepared.”
Coyan raised an eyebrow. “No ladders?”
“If they want to storm the wall they will have to make them. It will take a day or two perhaps, when they give up on the gate.”
“It will be a bloody job to hold them,” Coyan said.
Arbak could see it in his mind’s eye. He had been at the storming of Calnestra, a walled town, and that had been taken with ladders. It was an expensive way to fight, men died in numbers, but it worked if you could get a foothold on the walls. Seth Yarra had the numbers, and they would build enough ladders to cover the walls, two or three hundred of them carried across the open ground and laid against the wall all at once. There
would be no avoiding it – Seth Yarra could put more men on the top than they could with their makeshift stair.
If there was some way of denying them a part of the wall, whole sections of the wall, so that they must face his men on both sides, then that would give them an advantage. They already had an advantage, of course. The enemy must cross open ground under the bows of his archers, they must then climb ladders up to a platform on which his men waited, but they had the numbers. If they lost three thousand men in the assault they would still outnumber the defenders by more than two to one. If they captured the fighting platform it would all be over.
What they needed was a way to hold the ladders off the wall somehow, to stop the men stepping from the ladder onto the wall. Men with poles might do it, but men with poles would have to stand at the wall, and would be easily shot down by Seth Yarra archers supporting the assault.
What they needed was a curtain, a bar that prevented the ladders from touching the wall. It was a simple idea, and if he was designing a wall to withstand an assault he would certainly consider building such a thing into the stonework. But the wall was already built. The enemy would attack within a day, perhaps two.
An idea flashed into his head. It was such an odd image that he dismissed it at once, then brought it back again. He examined it. Tried to think what it would be like to climb the ladders if such a thing existed, but there were so many alternatives. Given a week it might become a good idea, refined by argument and consideration, but he had no time, and so it would be a desperate, half baked idea.
“Jerash?”
“Sir?” A head stuck out over the edge of the fighting platform above him.
“Are your friends up there?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Bring them down. I have another job for you.”
44. Henfray
It had been a mild winter until now, or a long autumn. But now the sky was grey, and the air was wet with sleet and rain, driving out of the west like retribution. The roads were turning to mud, and Skal Hebberd’s world was spinning on its axis. After Henfray everything was changed.
The Skal Hebberd who rode hunched against the weather at the head of eight hundred men was not the same man who had left Bas Erinor a month before, confident, arrogant, and impatient with life. That Skal Hebberd had known his quality, had been free of doubt, self sufficient, had despised his betters.
Betters. It was a bitter word for Skal. Before he had left Bas Erinor he would not have acknowledged anyone as a better, probably not as an equal, though he would have shown a grudging respect for those he thought capable – the duke, various other members of the Avilian nobility, the Wolf. It was a short list.
But Skal was quick to learn. He was intelligent. In the past he had not been much given to thinking, and he had instead assumed things about the world. It all seemed to bend so easily to his will. He learned his lessons, remembered facts, demonstrated great physical prowess at everything he attempted. He was demonstrably better that his peers. There had been Quinnial, of course. Many years ago there had been Quinnial the Perfect, his only rival, beloved second son of the duke, an alternate sun around which the lesser creatures of the court revolved. But Quinnial had fallen under a horse, his arm had been destroyed, and he became Quinnial the Cripple, the court joke, hiding from his erstwhile companions, locked in his rooms like some hideous secret.
When he re-emerged from seclusion he had not seemed a threat at all. Common sense suggested that he was only half a man, and yet others were still drawn to him, pulled away from Skal’s sphere of control. Skal had fought back with the only tools he had; his keen wit and physical prowess. He had belittled Quinnial at every turn, told jokes about his arm, become stronger, faster, more deadly.
For all that he did, there was still something about Quinnial that eluded him. There was a silence that he could not penetrate, a calm that would not be ruffled. It was like trying to bait the duke. The duke treated him like a puppy, which he was almost prepared to tolerate from the old man, though it bred in him a dislike for Quinnial’s father. From Quinnial such condescension was intolerable.
His own fall, the abasement of his family’s blood, had been shocking. It had torn his world apart, and he had sought someone to blame. There was only one man to whom the guilt stuck with any conviction, and that was his own father. Skal was no traitor. He despised other nations simply for not being Avilian, for not being what he was. To learn that his father had been plotting with Seth Yarra was almost more than he could bear. He had been filled with anger, and even facing the prospect of sharing in the blame for his father’s treachery had not cooled him. He had spat and snarled at those who held him – Quinnial especially. He had expected punishment, even death.
It was the point where his world began again.
Quinnial did something that Skal did not understand. He trusted him, gave him soldiers to command, a rank, a chance. Skal could see the advantage in it. With every drop of noble blood playing at war with Narak on the Great Plains he was probably the only man schooled in strategy remaining in Bas Erinor. If Quinnial wanted the soldiers to defeat the Seth Yarra he was the obvious choice, but if their roles had been reversed he would not have done the same. Quinnial was a rival. Even crippled he was someone who stole worth from Skal.
He had accepted the commission. Nothing could be worse than being a common man without rank, and a colonel’s command was not to be sneered at. He had command and he had a chance to distinguish himself.
A simple job. It should have been easy. He had numbers and cavalry. He knew enough about Seth Yarra to know how to beat them. He had studied all the battles of the last Great War and learned Remard’s strategies.
They rode along the coast to the enemy’s last reported position. He used caution, sending scouts ahead and widely to either side. His men saw nothing, day after day, and he pushed them hard. He wanted to catch these men, to kill them, and be back in Bas Erinor in time to pick up any other opportunity that might bring him renown.
Then the scouts had come back to tell him they had picked up the trail.
“You are sure?” he had asked. “There is no mistake?”
The scouts had exchanged a look.
“No mistake, colonel,” one had replied.
When he rode into the village he understood. The buildings were burned. There was not a barn or a house or even a shed that had escaped. It had become a village of charred timbers, heaped at unnatural angles, broken slates, brick chimneys tumbled down on the choked streets. But it was not the broken houses that demanded his attention. It was the smell. The village and the fields around it carried the stench of carrion, and when he rode into what remained of the village square Skal saw why.
Every man, woman and child, all the people who had lived here, had been slaughtered and piled in a bloody, stinking heap in the middle of their village. They had been left to rot.
Some of his men vomited on the ground. Skal turned his horse away from the sight and walked it to the windward side of the village where he stopped and sat looking at the bare branches of orchard trees, and the green grass. From here he could smell the sharp seaweed and salt freshness of the sea. Another horse stopped beside him. A glance told him that it was one of his lieutenants, a man called Hanishaw.
“Do you think they resisted?” Skal asked.
“Even if they did…”
“I know. It’s too much.”
“Do you want us to bury them, colonel?”
Skal had to think. What he’d seen had wrenched him from his academic, comfortable view of war. This wasn’t war. It was butchery. He was himself a man who did not flinch at cruelty, but this was disgusting, wasteful, excessive. It made him ill to think of all that blood spilt, and for what purpose?
“No,” he said. “It would take a week, and we don’t have the time. Burn them. The gods alone know what else they’ve done and I want to catch them before they kill every Avilian on the south coast.”
So they rode on, leaving a colu
mn of smoke behind them. Its sweet, rotten smell haunted them for a day. All the smiles were gone now. The adventure of war had become something else, something that had to be done. There were more villages, and in each one they found the same thing; burned houses, the dead piled up and rotting in the open air. There were carrion birds everywhere.
The one good thing, the thing that Skal focussed on, was that such killing took time. The Seth Yarra raiders were moving slowly across Avilian, and he was moving quickly. It would not be long before they met. He had never been angry before, he thought. His peevish, childish snapping did not compare to this. He was filled with a deep, raging fire; an urgent desire to kill. He looked eagerly forwards each day, wishing that he had mounts for all his men. He made his cavalry walk to rest the horses. He made them march fourteen hours each day, and still he fretted that they did not move fast enough.
