by Tad Williams
“God knows!”
Cursing again under his breath, Deornoth lowered his head and ran clumsily along behind Sir Grimstede’s messenger. He gathered half a dozen guardsmen as he went, tired men who had slumped down for a moment in the lee of the battlement to catch their breath. Summoned, they shook their heads regretfully, but donned their helms and followed; Deornoth was well-trusted; many called him the Prince’s Right Hand.
But Josua had poor luck with his first right hand, Deornoth thought sourly as he hunched along the walkway, sweating despite the cold gray air. I hope he keeps this one longer. And where is the prince, anyway? Of all times he should be seen…
Rounding the great bulk of Dendinis’ Tower, he was shocked to see Sir Grimstede’s men falling back, and the swarming red-and-blue colors of Baron Godwig’s Cellodshiremen pouring over the battlement onto the curtain wall.
“For Josua!” he shouted, leaping forward. The men behind him echoed his cry. They came against the besiegers with a tinny crash of sword on sword, and for a moment pushed the Shiremen back. One toppled from the walls, shrieking, windmilling his arms as though the chill wind might bear him up. Grimstede’s men took heart and pushed forward. While the enemy was engaged again, Deornoth pulled a pike from the stiff grasp of a sprawled corpse, suffering a hard blow to his body from a stray spear butt, and pushed the first of the tall ladders away from the wall. A moment later two of his guardsmen had joined him, and together they levered the ladder out; it went shivering into open space as the besiegers on it clung and cursed, their mouths gaping like black empty holes. For a moment it stood free, halfway between earth and heaven and perpendicular to both; then the ladder overbalanced backward toward the ground below, shedding soldiers like fruit from a shaken branch.
Soon all but a pair of the red-and-blue lay in their blood on the walkway. The defenders pushed the remaining three ladders away, and Grimstede had his men roll up one of the large stones they had not had time to move at the assault’s beginning. They tipped it over the low spot on the wall so that it went crashing down on the toppled ladders, splintering them like kindling and killing one of the laddermen who sat where he had tumbled, staring idiotically as the great stone rolled down upon him.
One of the defending guardsmen—a bearded young fellow who had diced with Deornoth once—lay dead, his neck broken by the edge of a shield. Four of Sir Grimstede’s men had also fallen, crumpled like wind-toppled scarecrows among seven men of Cellodshirc who had also not survived the failed assault.
Deornoth was feeling the blow of his stomach, and stood panting as gap-toothed Grimstede limped over to stand beside him, a ragged, bloody hole in the calf of his boot.
“ Tis seven here, an’ half-dozen more toombled off th’ ladder,” the knight said, staring down with satisfaction on the writhing bodies and wreckage below. “All down th’ wall it’s th’ same. Losin’ far more than we, King Elias is, far more.”
Deornoth felt ill, and his wounded shoulder throbbed as though a nail had been driven into it.
“The king has…far more than we do,” he replied. “…He can…toss them away like apple peelings.” Now he knew he would be sick, and moved toward the edge of the wall.
“Apple peelings…” he said again, and leaned over the parapet, too pained to feel shame.
“Read it again, please,” Jarnauga said quietly, staring at his knitted fingers.
Father Strangyeard looked up, his weary mouth open to form a question. Instead, a bone-jarring thump from outside brought a look of panic to the one-eyed priest’s face, and he quickly traced a Tree on the breast on his black robe.
“Stones’” he said, his voice shrill. “They are…they are throwing stones over the wall! Shouldn’t we…isn’t there…?”
“The men fighting atop the walls are in danger too,” the old Rimmersgarder said, his face stern. “We are here because we best serve here. Our comrades search for one sword in the white north, against lethal odds. Another is in the hands of our enemy already, even as he besieges our walls. What little hope there is of discovering what happened to Fingil’s blade Minneyar lies with us.” His expression softened as he regarded the worried Strangyeard. “The few stones that reach the inner keep must come over the high wall behind this room. We are at little risk. Now please, read that passage again. There is something in it I cannot quite touch, but that seems important.”
The tall priest stared down at the page for some moments, and as the room fell into silence a wave of cries and exhortations, muffled by distance, stole through the window like a mist. Strangyeard’s mouth twitched.
“Read,” suggested Jarnauga. The priest cleared his throat.
“ ‘…And so John went down into the tunnels beneath the Hayholt—steaming vents and sweating passageways alive with the breath of Shurakai. Unarmed but for a spear and shield, his very boot-leather smoking as he neared the firedrake’s den, he was, there is little doubt, as frightened as he ever would be in his long life…’ ”
Strangyeard broke off. “What use is this, Jarnauga?” Something thudded into the soil a short distance away with a sound like the fall of a giant’s hammer. Strangyeard stoically ignored it. “Do…do you want me to go on? Through all King John’s battle with the dragon?”
“No.” Jarnauga waved a gnarled hand. “Go to the ending passage.”
The priest carefully turned a few leaves.
“ ‘…Thus it was that he came out again, into the light, beyond any hope of return. Those few who had remained at the cave mouth—this itself an indication of great bravery, for who could know what might happen at the door of an angered dragon’s tunnel?—swore great oaths of joy and astonishment; joy, when they saw John of Warinsten come up alive from the worm’s den, and astonishment at the massive claw, crimson-scaled and hook-taloned, that he bore upon his bloody shoulder. As they went shouting down the road before him, leading his horse triumphantly through the gates of Erchester, the people came gaping to their windows and into the streets. Some say that those who had loudest prophesied John’s horrible death, and the dire consequences to themselves of the young knight’s actions, were now most audible in their acclaim of his great deed. As word spread, the rows were quickly lined with clamoring citizens who threw flowers before John as he rode, Bright-Nail lifted high before him like a torch-flame, through the city that was now his own…’ ”
Sighing, Strangyeard gently put the manuscript pages back into the cedar box he had found to house them. “A lovely and frightening story, I would say, Jarnauga, and Morgenes, hmmmm, yes, he puts things wonderfully—but what use to us?—no disrespect, you understand.”
Jarnauga squinted at his own prominent knuckles, and frowned. “I do not know. Something, there is something there. Doctor Morgenes, whether he wished to or no, put something there. Sky and clouds and stones! I can almost touch it! I feel blind!”
Another wash of noise came through the window: loud, worried shouts and the weighty chink of armor as a troop of guards jogged past in the commons outside.
“I do not think we have long to ponder, Jarnauga,” Strangyeard said finally.
“Nor do I,” said the old man, and rubbed his eyes.
All through the afternoon the tide of King Elias’ army dashed itself against Naglimund’s stony cliffs. The weak sunlight struck glinting shards of reflection from polished metal as wave after wave of mailed and helmeted soldiers swarmed up the ladders, only to be repelled by the castle’s defenders. Here and there the king’s forces found a momentary breach in the ring of stern men and grudging stone, but they were always pushed back. Fat Ordmaer, baron of Uttersall, held one such gap alone for long minutes, battling hand to hand with the scaling-soldiers mounting the ladders from below, slaying four of them and keeping the rest at bay until help arrived, although he got his own deathwound in the fighting.
It was Prince Josua himself who brought up a troop of guards, securing the length of wall and destroying the ladder. Josua’s sword Naidel was a ray of sunlight flickeri
ng through leaves, snicking swiftly in and out, making dead men from living while his attackers swung clumsy broadswords or inadequate daggers.
The prince cried when Ordmaer’s body was found. There had been no love lost between the baron and himself, but Ordmaer’s death had been a heroic one, and in the pulse of battle his fall suddenly seemed to Josua representative of all the others—all the pikemen and archers and foot-soldiers on both sides, dying in their own blood beneath cold, cloudy skies. The prince ordered that the baron’s great, limp bulk be carried down to the castle chapel. His guardsmen, cursing silently, complied.
As the reddening sun crawled toward the western horizon. King Elias’ army seemed to sag, to let up: their attempts to push the siege engines against the curtain wall in the hissing face of arrow-fire grew half-hearted, and the sealers began to abandon their ladders at the first resistance from the heights above. It was hard for Erkynlander to kill Erkynlander, even at the High King’s command. It was harder still when those brother Erkynlanders fought like denned badgers.
As sunset came on a mournful horn blast floated across the field from the lines of tents, and Elias’ forces began to fall back, dragging the wounded and also many of the dead, leaving the hide-covered siege towers and miner’s frames where they stood awaiting the next morning’s assault. As the horn sounded again the drums beat loudly, as though to remind the defenders that the king’s great army, like the green ocean, could send waves forever. Eventually, the drums seemed to say, even the stubbornest stone would crumble.
The siege towers, standing like solitary obelisks before the walls, were another obvious reminder of Elias’ intent to return. The damp hides hung upon them permitted no mere flaming arrow to do damage, but Eadgram the Lord Constable had been pondering all day. After seeking some advice from Jarnauga and Strangyeard, he had at last devised a plan.
Silently, even as the last of the king’s men limped down the slope toward their encampment, Eadgram bade his men load oil-filled winesacks onto the throwing arms of Naglimund’s two small slingstones. Then the arms were released, and oilsacks whistled across the open distance beyond the wall to splatter over the towers’ leather mantling. This done, it was a simple matter to send a few fiery pitchtipped arrows streaking through the blue twilight; within moments the four huge towers had become billowing torches.
There was nothing the king’s men could do to quell the blaze. The defenders on the walls clapped their hands together and stamped and shouted, weary but heartened, as orange light danced on the battlements.
When King Elias rode out from the camp, wrapped in his great black cloak like a man of shadows, Naglimund’s defenders jeered. When he lifted his strange gray sword, and shouted like a madman for rain to fall and quench the fiery towers, they laughed uneasily. It was only after a while, as the king rode back and forth, crow-black cape flapping in the cold wind, that they began to understand from the horrible anger in Elias’ echoing voice that he truly expected rain to come at his summoning, and that he was outraged it had not. The laughter faded into a fearful silence. Naglimund’s defenders, one by one, left off their celebrating and climbed down from the walls to tend their wounds. The siege, after all, had barely begun. There was no respite in view, and no rest this side of Heaven.
“I’ve been having strange dreams again, Binabik.”
Simon had ridden his horse up alongside Qantaqa, some yards ahead of the rest of the company. It was clear but terribly cold, this their sixth day riding across the White Waste.
“Dreams of what sort?”
Simon readjusted the mask the troll had made him, a strip of hide with a slit cut in it, to mask the fierce glare of the snow. “Of Green Angel Tower…or some tower. Last night I dreamed that it was running with blood.”
Binabik squinted behind his own mask, then pointed to a faint band of gray running along the horizon at the base of the mountains. “That, I am sure, is the edge of the Dimmerskog—or the Qilakitsoq, as my folk properly name it: the Shadow-wood. We should be upon it with another day or so.”
Staring at the dreary strip, Simon felt his frustrations boiling up.
“I don’t care about the damnable forest,” he snapped, “and I’m sick to death of ice and snow, ice and snow! We shall freeze and die in this awful wilderness! What about the dreams I’m having?!”
The troll bobbed along for a moment as Qantaqa had her way over a series of small drifts. Through the song of the wind Haestan could be heard shouting something to someone.
“I am already full of sorrow.” Binabik spoke measuredly, as if matching his speech to the cadence of their progress. “Awake I lay two nights in Naglimund, worrying what harm I would do in bringing you along for this journey. I have no knowledge of what your dreams mean, and the only way for finding it would be to walk the Road of Dreams.”
“As we did at Geloë’s house?”
“But I am having no faith in my unaided powers for that—not here, not now. It is possible your dreams could give us aid, but still I do not find it wise to walk the dream-road now. Here we are all, then, and this is what our fate will be. I can only say I have been doing what seemed best.”
Simon thought about this and grunted.
Here we all are. Binabik is right; here we all are, too far in to turn back.
“Is Inelu…” he made the sign of the Tree with fingers trembling from more than chill, “…is the Storm King…the Devil?” he asked at last.
Binabik frowned deeply.
“The Devil? The Enemy of your God? Why are you asking that? You have heard Jarnauga’s words—you know what Ineluki is.”
“I suppose.” He shivered. “It’s just that…I see him in my dreams. I think it’s him, anyway. Red eyes, that’s all I see, really, and everything else black…like burned-up logs with the hot places still showing through.” He felt ill just remembering.
The troll shrugged, hands caught up in the wolf’s neck ruff. “He is not your Devil, friend Simon. He is evil, though, or at least I am thinking that the things he wants will be evil for the rest of us. That is evil enough.”
“And…the dragon?” Simon said hesitantly a moment later. Binabik turned his head sharply, presenting his strange, slitted gaze.
“Dragon?”
’The one who lives on the mountain. The one whose name I can’t say.”
Binabik laughed explosively, his breath a cloud. “Igjarjuk is its name! Daughter of the Mountains, you are having many worries, young friend! Devils! Dragons’” He caught one of his own tears on the finger of his glove and held up. “Look!” he chuckled. “As if there was need of making more ice.”
“But there was a dragon!” Simon answered hotly. “Everyone said so!”
“Long ago, Simon. It is an ill-omened place, but that is being as much for its isolation as anything else, is my guessing. Qanuc legends tell a great ice-worm lived there once, and my people do not go there, but now I think it to be more likely a haunt of snow leopards and such creatures. Not that there will not be things of danger. The Hunën, as we are well-knowing, range far afield these days.”
“So then, truly I have little to fear? The most terrible things have been running through my head at night.”
“I was not saying you had little to fear, Simon. We must never be forgetting that we have enemies; some, it would seem, are very powerful indeed.”
Another frigid night in the Waste; another campfire in the dark emptiness of the surrounding snowfields. Simon would have liked nothing better in the entire world than to be curled up in a bed at Naglimund, covered in blankets, even if the bloodiest battle in the history of Osten Ard raged just outside his door. He was sure that if just now someone offered him a warm, dry place to sleep, he would lie or kill or take Usires’ name in vain to get it. He was positive, as he sat wrapped in his saddle blanket trying to keep his teeth from chattering, that he could feel his very eyelashes freezing on his lids.
Wolves were yipping and wailing in the unending darkness beyond the faint fireligh
t, carrying on long and mournfully intricate conversations. Two nights before, when the companions had first begun to hear their singing, Qantaqa spent the entire evening pacing nervously around the campfire circle. She had since grown used to the night cries of her fellows, and only responded with an occasional uneasy whimper.
“Why dunna she talk b-b-back at ’em?” Haestan asked worriedly. A plainsman of the Erkynlandish north, he had no more love for wolves than did Sludig, although he had grown almost fond of Binabik’s mount. “Why dunna she tell ’em t’go p-plague someone else?”
“Like men, not all tribes of Qantaqa’s kind are at peace,” Binabik replied, setting no one’s mind at ease.
Tonight the great she-wolf was doing her stalwart best to ignore the howling—pretending sleep, but giving herself away as her pricked ears swiveled toward the louder cries. The wolfsong, Simon decided as he huddled deeper in his blanket, was about the loneliest sound he had ever heard.
Why am I here? he wondered. Why are any of us here? Searching through this horrible snow for some sword no one has even thought about in years. Meanwhile, the Princess and all the rest of them are back at the castle waiting for the king to attack! Stupid! Binabik grew up in the mountains, in the snow—Grimmric and Haestan and Sludig are soldiers—the Aedon alone knows what the Sithi want. So why am I here? It’s stupid!
The howling quieted. A long forefinger touched Simon’s hand, making him jump.
“Do you listen to the wolves, Seoman?” Jiriki asked.
“It’s hard n-not to.”
“They sing such fierce songs.” The Sitha shook his head. “They are like your mortal kind. They sing of where they have been, and what they have seen and scented. They tell each other where the elk are running, and who has taken whom to mate, but mostly they are merely crying ‘I am! Here I am!’ ” Jiriki smiled, veiling his eyes as he watched the dying fire.
“And th-thats what you think we…we m-m-mortals are saying?”