The Wolf

by Leo Carew

  But Roper was making things difficult. He had won an overwhelming tactical victory and, for the people of the Black Kingdom, martial achievement trumped all else. So Uvoren used that to his advantage. Subtly, through a dozen sources scattered about the Hindrunn, a new rumour began to circulate. It was being said that after Roper’s latest victory, the Sutherners had approached him with a deal to share the eastern lands and that Roper had accepted. It was all the fortress spoke of for days: had you not yet heard that the Black Lord planned to make peace with the Sutherners, in exchange for a fat slice of the east?

  But in the end, it was Roper himself who eliminated the need for Uvoren’s machinations. On the twenty-third day after Roper had left the fortress, new tidings reached Uvoren. They started faint and unconfirmed, then became a little more persistent. Finally, there could be no doubt. Roper, having marched to Githru and sought to bring the Sutherners to battle there, had suffered a cataclysmic defeat.

  It had been tactical incompetence; no more. Reportedly, he had held a strong defensive position and legionaries in good morale but, spooked by something, he had tried to withdraw at the last minute. The Sutherners had unleashed their knights and the narrow battlefield had seen a slaughter.

  And now they were retreating. The remnants of Roper’s legions were withdrawing to the Hindrunn, hounded by the Suthern army. Roper was fighting a desperate rearguard action with what forces remained to him and a column of wounded men were beginning to draw near to the Hindrunn. Uvoren rode out to meet them himself.

  Wagons, stuffed with the injured, were trundling by the dozen along the road back to the Hindrunn. Even to Uvoren, this was a pitiful sight. It seemed they had retreated so fast that the surgeons had not even had time to address their wounds. Shrivelled intestines lay sprawling from several legionaries, who were pale and still. Most were evidently dead already. Blood, both dried and fresh, stained everything and the men groaned and writhed as the wagons jolted over ruts and stones in the track. Some of the men were bandaged in linen strips stained rust-red, many just hunched and unmoving. Few of them would survive much beyond their return to the Hindrunn.

  “Not many of them,” observed Uvoren.

  “The rest are dead, lord,” responded the wagon-driver. “These were all we could save.”

  “Almighty god,” said Uvoren, mouth twitching. He stared at the driver in incredulity, keeping his horse level with the man. “How many does Boy-Roper still have?”

  “Few enough, lord. Fifteen thousand, I would guess.”

  Uvoren coughed and spluttered. “Fifteen thousand! The Hindrunn will not be pleased.”

  So that was that. Roper’s nerve had failed him, as Uvoren had known it would, and he had thrown away his warriors and his chance of ruling the Black Kingdom. Uvoren did feel the glow of triumph that he had expected, but also a wave of hot anger. Incompetence: that was all that had killed those legionaries. Roper had no business being a ruler. He was weak.

  “I bet the first victory was Tekoa,” he suggested to Tore, legate of the Greyhazel, as the two rode back to the Hindrunn together. There was a chill on the air and Uvoren, like all good Anakim, was enjoying the cold. That was why there was so little glass in the Hindrunn: to be warm was to be insulated from the wild. The Anakim had a word for this insulation: fraskala, the feeling of being cocooned. The opposite, expressed as a positive, was maskunn: exposed.

  “He would have known that Roper could not be trusted and would have kept him on a short leash.”

  “And Tekoa let him off his leash for the second battle,” agreed Tore. “With the result that Roper spent twenty thousand legionaries.” He spoke bitterly. It was a terrible waste and even if they could still repel the Sutherners from their lands, it would take generations to recover from such a loss.

  “Let the legions know!” said Uvoren, glee and rage vying for control of his voice. “Tell them what Roper has done, Bera,” he addressed Tore by his haskoli nickname. “Do you know, we might get away without destroying Roper’s forces? I doubt they’ll fight for him after a second disaster. If we kill Roper, the others will join us.”

  “Probably. But kill Roper in front of the gates and we can see how his remaining legionaries react.”

  “Very good. A couple of cannon will do nicely.”

  “And what about Tekoa? How’s he going to react to all this? If he’s even alive.”

  “He’ll have survived,” said Uvoren, confidently. “He’s not one to die in a losing cause. He’ll have seen which way the wind was blowing. We’ll take him in. Give him a nice position and some influence and he’ll be happy. And with his daughter widowed? Maybe I’ll take her in too.”

  “You have a wife,” observed Tore.

  “Yes,” said Uvoren impatiently. “But think about the authority invested in a child that was half-Lothbrok, half-Vidarr. That’d be a lineage to rival the Jormunrekur.”

  “With or without the Vidarr, we can rule for a thousand years.”

  The two men returned to the fortress. The wagons of wounded that trundled through the gates and straight into the surgery shortly after them would be the last soldiers allowed in whilst Roper still lived. Behind them, the locking bars clunked into place and the portcullis, lowered only when a hostile army approached, slid down in front of the Great Gate.

  The legions were summoned. The two regular legions, the Blackstones and the Greyhazel, assembled on the wall either side of the Great Gate, prepared to receive Roper’s men with a show of force. The others, the auxiliaries, formed up closer to the middle of the Hindrunn, ready to be sent to any part of the wall that might face attack.

  The great bronze dragon-cannons which studded the Outer Wall were loaded, double-shotted for a devastating first volley. These were so enormous that, when they were fired, their operators had to stand against the wall and scream to prevent their eardrums bursting. Their range was immense but that night Uvoren did not expect them to be used at more than fifty yards. Roper would be declared an outlaw and blown apart.

  The fire-throwers’ tanks, held deep within the Outer Wall, were charged. When the enemy drew near, pedals would be used to pump air into the tanks and raise the pressure, ready for use. These could drench all those within thirty yards of the wall in sticky-fire, hot enough to melt flesh and unquenchable except when smothered in sand. Certainly, they were the most feared instruments at the Hindrunn’s disposal.

  Ballistae and siege bows were manoeuvred into position and bolt-caches positioned nearby.

  The plate-hurlers—mechanical weapons that could fling sharpened steel disks into the enemy ranks to produce devastating cutting wounds—were shuffled into position and loaded with their heavy projectiles.

  Buckets and buckets of arrows were brought to the top of the wall. Next to them, old masonry was piled, ready to be hurled down.

  The refugees beyond the Outer Wall could hear these preparations, deduced there must be a hostile army approaching, and fled into the evening. Those within the walls saw the legionaries mustering in the street and the weapons being carried to the outer layers and hurried away. It would not have been unusual to prepare the fortress in this way with a Suthern army nearby, but everybody knew who these weapons would be aimed at. They knew Roper and his ruined army were drawing close. Everyone had heard of the disaster at Githru and that Roper was soon to be declared that worst of things: an enemy of the realm. An outlaw. A creature without loyalty, whose body would be obliterated to prevent it rising to fight with the dead when Catastrophe emerged from the sands in the east. In the conflict between the Wolf and the Wildcat, the only sensible thing to do was to get out of the way.

  Shaded figures scurried up the street, too preoccupied to pay attention to the two women who sat in a bordering garden beneath a hawthorn. The taller woman was propped against the wall of the house at her back; the smaller against the trunk of the tree. Even through the gloom, the taller woman’s green eyes shone as they tracked the figures before her. They were mostly women, clutching wood, nai
ls, charcoal, axes and sacks of dried fruit; the last items needed to prepare their households for the impending siege. Their men were elsewhere: already waiting armoured at their stations.

  There was a long-established and unspoken agreement in siege warfare. If you forced an opposing army to storm your stronghold, they would make you pay for your resistance once inside. If the Black Lord could somehow force entry, the fury of his soldiers would be terrible. They would almost certainly vent it on their own home, which, after all, had turned against them first with cannon and fire-thrower.

  “A lot of fear,” observed the tall woman.

  Her smaller companion was the young serving girl, Glamir, who worked in Tekoa’s household. She did not turn to face Keturah as she answered. “We should go inside. What if Uvoren comes for you?”

  “The Captain of the Guard has bigger issues on his mind just now. He’ll probably come when he’s finished with my husband, and a closed door won’t stop him.” She rolled her eyes. “That’s going to be a tedious conversation.”

  Keturah was not thinking about Uvoren. She was not thinking about her husband. She was not even thinking particularly of her father, trusting him to find his own way through whatever happened beyond the walls.

  She was thinking about the friends she had, marching under Roper. Or maybe now marching no longer, but spent by him; left at that feverish battlefield by the sea. But some must have survived: kind men, with whom she had often shared a joke and a snippet of gossip. Who had trained their particular interest on her; tried to charm and impress her; given her little presents they had made; appeared outside her father’s house to sing to her when drunk. More than once, Tekoa, his brow thunderous, his manner abrupt but his eyes gleeful, had dressed in his mighty legate’s cloak and stormed outside to the gathering circle of onlookers and demanded that, unless they removed this twittering scoundrel at once, he would take a testicle from each one of them to be hammered together for a bar of soap.

  How would they behave, those kind men, if they broke past the warriors waiting on the walls, and forced their way into these streets? The most likely possibility, she considered, was that they would come and find her, to protect her from the blooming chaos and others who stalked these passages with less worthy motives. But there was an alternative that she could not quite put from her mind. Perhaps, instead, their thoughts would be contaminated by the violence. She did not fear the appearance of a fierce stranger, crashing through her bolted door, as much as she feared that figure being one of her friends. Or rather, a shell that resembled a friend, but walked more purposefully, each step like a lunge. In the aftermath of great battles, she had seen men rendered unrecognisable by the horrors through which they had passed. Creatures beyond emotion and beyond reason; their consciousness savagely truncated, wide eyes set on her. She pitied them, but she also feared what it would do to her to see those figures prowling the dark streets beyond her door, or worse still, trying to get through it. Whether that was truly what her friends were, when pushed beyond the harsh laws of her country, she did not want to know.

  “Do you hear that?” said Glamir, unexpectedly.

  Keturah listened. She could not hear anything in particular. The patter of leather-soled slippers hurrying over the cobbles. A pair of wood pigeons sitting in the tree above, cooing into the dusk. The tree’s last leaves scratching in the wind. The soft gurgle of the stream that crossed the street.

  But she could feel something, she realised. A faint, rhythmic quiver in her guts. It crossed her flesh, prowled through her lungs and up her throat. She glanced at her companion. “I feel it.”

  Before the two women, the figures on the street slowed and came to a halt as they too became aware of the sensation. Heads jerked up to look above the walls, up at the lavender sky, and all fell quiet. The leaves shivered and the stones quaked at the bass tattoo of a distant army, marching in step. Many on the street shared a look; some of them seeming to become aware of Keturah’s gaze for the first time and glancing at where she sat in the shadows. The water of the stream began to pulse in regular waves, ordered by the rhythmic thump of boots. Then the spell was broken and the activity in the street redoubled. Doors began to slam left and right from Keturah and, within a few moments, the cobbles were abandoned.

  Keturah glanced at her companion with a wry smile and received a look of sympathy in return. “I hope your father is victorious, ’Turah.”

  Keturah looked away. “So do I,” she said. “But it seems unlikely. Belligerence will only carry you so far.”

  “Your father is a survivor. He will come through.”

  “It’s possible,” said Keturah. “The one person who won’t survive is Roper, though. So much for my marriage.”

  “You’re better without him,” said Glamir. “He struck a deal with the Sutherners!”

  Keturah tutted, drawing that conversation to a close. “Of course he didn’t.” She sat unnaturally still, head tilted back against the wall, her countenance almost bored. Beside her, Glamir was agitated; looking down the street and then up at the sky.

  “How much of this fortress do you think will be left standing by tomorrow?” said Glamir.

  “Swords cannot cut stone,” came Keturah’s tart reply. The ensuing silence was tainted by the thump of marching boots. Keturah knew that Glamir was about to speak again, and what she was going to say.

  “I am scared,” came the quiet words.

  “You’ll be fine, my dear,” said Keturah. She grasped Glamir’s hand to soften her calloused tone.

  “Not only of the assault,” said Glamir. “I am scared for you. You are a pawn in this game.”

  The ground trembled in the pause that followed. Keturah did not move. Then she shrugged. “Me and everyone else.”

  As night began to fall, it felt as though winter had at last draped its cloak over the fortress. The air was sharp and dry. The breath of the legionaries assembling atop the wall rose as mist. The men gathered, exchanged a brief word by way of greeting, and then waited in silence. No one wanted to speak. The rumbling of marching feet had morphed into something they could sense with their ears. It was like distant applause: an audience of ten thousand clapping in time.

  Tramp-tramp-tramp-tramp-tramp.

  There was no moon that night; the Blackstones and the Greyhazel could see nothing from behind their high battlements. The lime-lanterns were lit: four enormous lamps on the Great Gatehouse which burnt a combination of lime and pressurised gas with a brilliant white flame. A parabolic mirror behind the flame could be used to focus this intense light before the walls of the Hindrunn and illuminate any approaching army. These were as much weapons as anything else: an enemy advancing into such intensity would be utterly dazzled. Bundles of hay soaked in oil were tossed from the walls, ready to be ignited with flaming arrows. The darkness would offer no shelter to Roper’s men.

  Uvoren watched atop the Great Gatehouse, leaning against one of the battlements and waiting for the enemy to come into view. He knew the sound of a marching army, and maybe it was something to do with the cold air, or just the contrast with the intense silence that had fallen over the battlements, but this one was louder than he had expected. Deeper. He tried to talk to calm his men, but his voice, like a candle lit in an abyss, merely highlighted the true extent of the dark. He fell silent.

  It was no wonder the men were quiet. They had never fought Anakim before, still less their own kin. If it came to hand-to-hand combat, they would meet with friends across steel. It was easier to be brave going into battle against the Sutherners: fellow Anakim were a different proposition entirely. And not just any Anakim. Ramnea’s Own Legion. The Sacred Guard itself. No man wanted to fight such warriors.

  It was not until the noise of marching feet was powerful enough to rattle the grit on the battlements that Uvoren thought he could discern Roper’s army in the darkness beyond the walls. It was barely visible: a shimmering river of reflected starlight, heading straight for the Great Gate. It seemed they bore no tor
ches, allowing themselves to be guided home by the charcoal glow of the Hindrunn.

  “Not long now, boys,” declared Uvoren. His words did not even seem to have reached the man next to him. Even Tore, standing to Uvoren’s left, was silent and watchful as the head of the column gathered itself from the dark, illuminated by the lime-lanterns. Though it was hard to tell, there was no sign of the pursuing Suthern army. The legions must have out-marched them.

  They were in good order, for a broken force. They looked almost ghostly, light drizzling from armour and weapons while their bodies remained dark. It was as though this was nothing more than a column of armour coming to besiege their home, having left their flesh behind. But surely armour could not make the ground tremble with the tramp of feet. It menaced the whole fortress. Those subjects waiting inside their homes could hear it shaking the slates on their roofs, and anticipated the first roar of a dragon-cannon that would tell them their home was being assaulted.

  At the front of the column was the Sacred Guard. Now they had drawn closer to the lime-lanterns, they looked magnificent. Brilliant white light radiated from their armour. They were straight-backed and proud; almost angelic in their bright raiment, and far from the whipped dogs Uvoren was expecting.

  Among them rode Roper. He looked quite as splendid as he had when he left, mounted on his enormous destrier, a huge presence in his cloak which resisted all attempts at illumination. He and his men marched proudly, showing no signs of trepidation, though they must surely know that Uvoren was not about to open the gates for them.

  Roper and the Guard drew closer and closer and still nothing happened. Uvoren did not command the cannon to open fire and Roper did not look as if he was planning to attack. He was simply heading directly for the gate, as though it would open for him as surely as it had always done. Perhaps Roper simply had not understood the deal he had struck with Uvoren. Whatever the cause, he and the Sacred Guard were marching straight for the gate. They were within range of the fire-throwers.