by Holly Lisle
But who could have imagined so many would come against them? The land was blackened with the enemy as far as the eye could see. How many arrows did they have? How many bags of poison powder? How many deadfalls, how many rocks?
He raced into camp, and men raised their heads to stare after him and eyes went flat and faces grew grim. Soldiers put aside their guitars and their wenches and their cook pots, and stood, and shook off all vestiges of play. In his eyes and his expression they saw a small reflection of what he had seen, and they knew.
Ranan caught him by the shoulders as he bolted toward Ranan’s tent. “Tell me.”
“They . . . come . . .” he gasped. “Thousands of thousands. In lines. Like . . . army ants. Namid said . . . fire arrows. And men at Highbridge and . . . Long Fall and Third Point. And the poison powder for the catapults. And hurry.”
“Scouts?”
“Not yet.”
Ranan nodded.
Another brother, Tupi—he from the island of Bitter Kettle and a mother who had begged him not to go—raced into camp from the western side and charged up to Ranan. “Men to Second Pass now,” he panted. He stood for a moment with his hands on his knees, his head hanging down while he tried to catch his breath. The watch-point above Second Pass was farther from camp than that above Main Pass.
“How many?” Ranan asked.
“We thought at first a shadow moved across the distant hills toward us, but there were no clouds. We could not believe what we saw.”
“Scouts?”
“We could see them breaking off in the distance. Mounted, some of them. And the enemy has fliers of some sort.”
“The Scarred would.”
“We’re well hidden. But we’ll need all the reinforcements we can get.”
Ranan nodded. “Both passes, then.”
Har watched his oldest brother’s eyes, and shivered at the bleakness in them. People were going to die this day, and Ranan was the one who would command them to their deaths. And one of those so commanded might be him.
“Get back to your post,” Ranan said, looking at Har but seeming not to see him. “Tell Namid he’ll have full forces. Don’t touch the scouts unless you’re in danger of being discovered, and if you have to kill them, try to do it discreetly.”
Har nodded.
“Run,” Ranan said, and turned to Tupi.
Har ran back the way he had come, praying that he would survive to see another sunrise.
• • •
The scouts came first—a dozen beastly riders astride their deformed mounts galloping into the pass, a dozen more batlike flying Scarred soaring overhead. The men who held the foremost positions lay flat beneath their camouflage of cloth painted to look like rocks, grateful then for Ranan’s repetition of Halifran’s Maxim: “What the enemy might do is irrelevant; plan against what he can do.”
They had muttered, “Can our enemy see through solid stone? Can he fly?” when creating the shelters—and Ranan had shrugged and said, “Perhaps. We won’t know until we find out who our enemy is.”
And now they found out—they, who had thought the whole exercise a waste of time, and Dùghall and Ranan deluded, and the gold Ranan spent to have men trek into the mountains to haul rocks and paint canvas and build deadfalls money for nothing. Ranan looked increasingly brilliant as the scouts flitted overhead, blind to the traps that lay ahead of them, and soared back the way they had come.
When the scouts were gone, the full force of Ranan’s troops moved into position. Still hidden beneath painted awnings, they loaded the sacks of poison powder into their catapults and tested the wind to make sure it carried down into the pass from them. They moved their fireboxes close to the fire pits where wood and tinder, neatly piled and dry, waited to fuel the fires from which they would light their arrows. They tested the blades with which they would cut the ropes that held back the great stone deadfalls. Then they crouched, barely breathing, watching the massed forces of the monsters beginning to move forward, and their guts clenched and twisted, and their hearts beat against their ribs, and their mouths went dry and tasted bitter with fear.
Har, still in the foremost position, offered fervent prayers to the island gods of home, and a quick, hopeful prayer to the Iberan gods who watched over the mountains and the cold, foreign land in which he huddled.
Then the first lines of the fighting forces arrived, and he and those who hid with him waited for the signal. He knew it would be long in coming—the pass needed to be full of the enemy before the defenders dared attack.
So the first hundreds of the Scarred monsters passed unaccosted beneath the waiting, huddled humans, dragging catapults and siege engines and weapons Har could not identify on great wooden-wheeled wagons behind them. The pass was broad enough that a dozen men could ride abreast—it easily accommodated the attackers and their weapons and their hideous war beasts. The enemy moved forward alertly, keeping scouts constantly in motion, but the troops of the Scarred showed no fear and no awareness of the trap into which they moved—they chattered among themselves, clusters of enormous gray shaggy beasts bellowing at each other as they marched, and little black-and-silver furred things chirping and squawking, almost like monkeys except for the clothes that they wore, and brown-furred monsters with faces like friendly bears who growled and trilled at each other, their ears flicking as they sauntered toward disaster.
The first part of the pass filled, the troops below moving out of sight around the sharp curve the defenders named First Point. There seemed as many of them yet to come as there had been before—but now some of the noncombatants were moving into range, traveling in the center of the thinned-out column. Females with their babes in arms; children running among the wagons or riding atop them, playing games and shouting; the old and the infirm clustered together on the padded benches of special wagons. Watching them, Har began to feel sick in a different way. He had feared his own death at the hands of the soldiers below—had feared their retaliatory strikes on their preemptive attacks should their scouts discover him and his comrades before they could strike.
Now, though, he realized that innocents traveled among his enemies, and that those innocents would die, and that he would have a part in killing them. Being from the Imumbarran Isles, he had never developed the hatred for the Scarred that Iberans had—the Scarred traded with his people often, and some made their homes in the outer isles. He saw the creatures below as people—and he wanted to cry. How could warriors bring their wives and children with them? How could they risk everything they held dear? What did they hope to gain?
“They want Ibera itself,” Namid said, when he dared a whispered question. “They’re leaving the Scarred lands of the Veral Territories, looking for a home well away from the poison of the Wizards’ Circles.” He sighed. “I guess attacking Ibera looks easier than attacking Strithia.”
“Well . . . Strithia . . .” Har said, and fell silent, thinking that no one could be mad enough to try to invade the Strithians.
They stared down at the unending column that poured beneath them. The fighters kept their places to either side, the flying scouts soared past, usually still below Har’s position high on the side of the mountain but sometimes above it, noncombatants traveled in the center with the weapons and supplies, and the whole force looked to Har like it would never end.
“At the speed they’re going, they’ll be to Third Point at any time.”
Har said, “There aren’t enough of them in the pass yet.”
“As many as will fit. We can’t help the fact that there are too many of them still outside it.”
“Their fighters will come up over the sides at us.”
Namid nodded. “When we drop our deadfall, we’re going to have to run. The ones outside the pass will mark our position quick enough, and some of those flying scouts carry arms, too. We can’t hope to have much effect on them.”
“So we’ll run to First Point.”
“Have to. They have archers there. They’ll be able to
give us some cover.”
Har nodded. “If I don’t live, tell my mother I fought well, would you? And that I thought of her.”
Namid held out a hand. “I’ll swear on it. And you tell my mother the same thing, should I die.”
“What about Father?”
“He’ll know. He’s always known what happened to all of us.”
Har took Namid’s hand and said, “You’re right. So I’ll swear to tell her.” They clasped hands, then quickly turned back to the pass.
From Third Point, they heard the sounding of a horn—high and clear and mournful in the early morning air.
Neither of them hesitated, though Har fought tear-blurred vision as he worked. The brothers sawed through the thin ropes that bound the heavy ropes which held the deadfall boards in place. The boards fell away, tearing at the painted canvas that hid them from the enemy—and rocks and boulders, carefully piled behind those boards, burst free in a torrent and crashed down into the pass with an avalanche’s roar. Har heard the same roar repeated farther up the pass.
The screams started, and the neatly ordered column scattered like ants stirred with a stick—the attackers ran madly, some fleeing out of the pass, some running deeper into trouble, some trampling their own and racing in circles in their desperate attempt to find safety. The rockfalls blocked the pass at Third Point and at Highbridge and at Long Fall, and at the mouth as well.
Once they had the enemy trapped—or as much of the enemy as they could hope to hold—the defenders launched the bags of poison powder from their catapults. The bags had been carefully designed to burst upon impact—the powder was light and billowed up in huge clouds when it struck. From within the white clouds, Har heard coughing. Then cries of agony, and screaming, and retching.
“Run now,” Namid shouted, and burst from their hiding place. Har followed him, keeping his eyes on the narrow, treacherous path that led along the uneven ledge to First Point. The enemy’s flying scouts were nowhere to be seen, the first wave of the enemy’s army, trapped in the pass, was dying, and Har began to hope that some of the gods might have heard his prayer and cared that he and his many brothers and the soldiers who fought with them might live to see another day.
He tried to keep himself from hearing the anguished cries that reached him from below. He tried to keep himself from picturing the horrors that lay down there—the bodies of men and women and children of the Thousand Peoples crushed beneath rocks, writhing from the poison, burning from the rain of flaming arrows. He was protecting his own people, and the evil he had done he did for them. For the men and women and children of the small villages in the mountains who went about their lives, blissfully unaware of the marching death that bore down on them.
He tried, but he was no callous killer. He was a boy, far away from his home and the people he had loved all his life, and he had been forced to kill because he believed he had no choice. He still believed he had no choice.
But he wanted to hide his face for shame that such slaughter should be the only solution to the danger his people faced.
He and Namid reached First Point and dove beneath the sheltering camouflaged awnings and watched the archers shooting down at anything in the powder-coated mess below that still moved.
“Time to retreat soon,” one of the men said.
“We’re winning,” Namid said. “Why would we retreat now?”
“Because we’re out of poison, almost out of arrows, and have no more deadfalls built. And they’re already pulling down the first of the deadfalls. Didn’t you see them?”
The one thing they had not been able to see from their position was the area directly below their ledge—which was the location of the first deadfall.
“No,” Namid said. “We didn’t see them.”
“We aren’t going to be able to hold this position for long. Ranan has already warned us to be ready to fall back to Third Point when the horn sounds again. We’re to resupply from the caves there. Maybe we’ll be able to clear a second wave before we’re out of everything—but that second wave won’t just march up the pass like this one did. We’re going to have to fight like demons.”
“And then what will we do?” Har asked.
The veteran’s mouth twisted into a weary smile. “Then we run like hell and hope they’ve braced themselves back behind us.”
• • •
Ranan, from his aerie atop Highbridge, watched both the main pass and the small secondary pass and felt a moment of triumph. The failed second wave of attackers faltered and the few survivors fled backward. He counted his own casualties, dead from aerial attack and enemy catapult fire and the one bag of poison powder that burst in midair and rained back on a friendly position, and guessed that of the near-thousand men he’d led in the morning, some seven hundred survived in fighting condition. Bodies of the enemy filled both passes, in places three and four and five deep; he could only guess at the number of enemy dead, but his guess numbered ten thousand. If he went by the numbers, this Battle of Two Passes would make him one of the great generals of history.
He would not take pride in his victory, however. Most of the enemy dead had fallen in the first wave, and a good half of those had been noncombatants. The bodies of mothers and babes, of children, of old men and old women, lay trampled with and tangled among those of the soldiers they’d followed. And it wasn’t over. He had hoped that the enemy, twice slaughtered by a force it could not kill and could not intimidate, would turn back, and thus would not discover that he and his men had reached the end of their resources and would not be able to offer resistance to a third wave.
He had dared hope that even if he had not won such a substantial victory as a full retreat, this Army of the Thousand Peoples might halt for a while, reconsider its plan of attack, and in so doing give him and his people time to regroup and resupply.
The enemy, however, was setting up a third wave—a force that would launch itself into both passes under cover of the coming darkness. From what he could see from Highbridge, this third force was as large as the first two combined—and it would not include noncombatants.
Ten thousand armed fighters against seven hundred men who had nothing left but their personal arms—swords, daggers, cudgels, slings, and shields. Behind the forming third wave, enough of the Scarred remained to launch a fourth, and perhaps a fifth. He and his force had succeeded in slowing the enemy down—nothing more. The army of the Scarred would have to clear away rockfalls and bodies before it could move its war machines through the passes, but when its path was cleared, it would come on. Inexorably, it would come on.
Ranan turned to the young man beside him, the son of his favorite wife’s best friend, and said, “Sound retreat.”
Chapter 42
Danya, astride her giant lorrag, watched over the removal of the dead from the pass. They were bringing out some of the children of the Kargans: children she had once ferried across the Sokema River to pick berries; children who had taught her the subtleties of language and culture in her adopted home; children whom she had liked.
Their backs arched; their mouths stretched open in silent screams; their eyes bulged wide and frightened, the corneas no longer clear and shiny, but clouded, dull, coated with dirt and powder.
Children.
She stared at Luercas, standing near the mouth of the pass, who was directing a group of Trakkath soldiers in disposal of the bodies. He remained untouched by the deaths; but then, why could she have thought he might be moved? He’d led her to destroy her own child, then stolen his body. What could the deaths of other innocents mean to him?
He saw her looking at him, mounted his lorrag, and rode to her side. “Mother. Dear. If it’s going to upset you so much, perhaps you ought to go hide with the rest of the helpless.”
She said, “I’m not upset.”
“I could feel your distress from clear over there.” He nodded toward the growing pile of bodies. “You can’t have a war without a few corpses.”
She lifted h
er chin and looked at him coldly. “Why those corpses? Why mothers and babies? Why grandfathers? Why little boys and little girls?”
“If you want to ask those questions, then why anyone?” Luercas shrugged. “Why is the life of a little girl more worthy of tears than the life of a trained soldier? Why do you weep for the lost children but not for the lost men?”
Danya, the daughter of Galweighs, born and raised with Family duty as the core of her existence, had no doubts on that score. “Those whose duty it is to serve must be prepared to offer as much as their lives.”
“But do they love life any less to go so unmourned, their sacrifices so unquestioned? Has the soldier in the flower of his manhood lost less or more than the ignorant child, or the all-but-unknowing babe?”
Danya glared at him. “Now that we have come this far, would you convince me to leave off this war? To retreat to the Veral wastes again?”
“Not at all.” Luercas turned and studied the soldiers who were pulling out the last few bodies and adding them to the pyre. “I would only alert you to your own hypocrisy. You act as if ignorance and innocence add value to the worth of a life, and act as if you believe that those who have the most to gain have the least to lose. But the fact that those soldiers walked into that pass for you knowing that they might die does not make the price they paid less than the price paid by the children who died unaware of their danger. Rather, I would think they paid more, and hold them in higher esteem.” He turned to study her face, and when he saw that she was giving his words serious consideration, he laughed. “I would value them if they were truly men, of course. These are just smart beasts—but those they kill on your word in the coming days will be as human as you.”
He started to ride off, then turned back and grinned at her.
“As human as you once were, anyway.”