by Jo Clayton
A hand touched her shoulder. She sat back on her heels, cradled the rifle on her thighs, looked around. Rane, back from the m6lee. “Did someone get that idiot down?”
“After he took a shaft in the shoulder.”
“Teach him anything?”
“Doubt it.” Rane chuckled. “Didn’t stop grinning even when Dina was sawing at the shaft and pulling it out of him.”
Julia shook her head. “Him and Angel’s bunch. Seems that kids are the same wherever they grow up.”
Rane chuckled again, and began wiping her sword carefully with a bit of soft leather.
Farther down the wall Angel was cursing as he cut an arrow from a horse’s flank. There was a girl in healer white holding the beast’s head and soothing it while he worked. Another horse was down, dead. Stenda men and mijlockers were using pikes and ropes to pry it up over the knee-high guardwall. More of the white-clad girl medics were helping the wounded down the ramp, a slightly older medic was kneeling beside one of the mijlockers, working on a wound in his leg. As the wounded were helped away, reinforcements came up to take their places. Five hundred against five thousand. But they were holding the wall, a precarious hold maintained by Hern’s careful use of his fighters, by the quick medical treatment, by the tireless efforts of Serroi. They were holding, but Kole hadn’t sent his trained fighters against them yet, he was using the conscripts to wear them down, use up their ammunition, tire them out, whittle away at their numbers. Julia got to her feet, unclipped the canteen from her belt, unscrewed the lid and took a drink. The tepid, metal-tainted water went down fast and easy, cut the dust in her throat and washed away some of the sourness that came into her mouth when she thought of all the killing. She used her rifle with skill and coolness, concentrating on doing it well while she was in the midst of the skirmishes, concentrating on swallowing her loathing for the whole business when it was over. She passed the canteen to Rane. “How close was this one?” She took the canteen back, clipped it onto her belt. “I was too busy to watch.”
Rane waited until the motor roar from below died down a little. “Got more over the wall this time. You saw Hakel doing his dance. He got off lighter than he should but he stopped them.” She scowled back along the wall. “My sister’s son. He does something like that again and. I twist his ear for him.” Julia smiled to herself at the reluctant pride in Rane’s voice. The ex-meie went on, “We have five prisoners, the rest that got over are dead. Our side, three dead, a dozen wounded, six of them bad, don’t know if they can get them to Serroi in time, the rest, arms or legs or a scrape. Most of them ready to be back on the wall tomorrow, blessed be She for giving us Serroi.”
Julia looked past her, saw two men lifting a boy and putting him on a stretcher; his head swung to one side and she saw his face, the gap-toothed, silent scream, as they lifted him. Rudy. She sighed, rubbed her hand across her face. Nothing new for him, his life was one bloody wound. She didn’t know if he could remember any happy times, though there should have been some good moments when he was with his family and they were still working their land.
Liz touched Julia’s shoulder. “Time’s up, Julia. Catch a ride to the shelter and get something to eat.” She squatted beside the crenel, her companion meie with her, Leeshan, a golden minark who looked too small-boned and fragile to fight. “We’ll keep the nasties off you.”
“Hah.” Julia slung the rifle over her shoulder, glanced at the men and women hoisting the dead attackers into the crenels and shoving them off to fall at the base of the wall. “They should be quiet a while now.”
Julia and Rane trudged down the nearest ramp and snagged a ride in the pickup ambulance. The day was bright and cold but there were banks of clouds in the west and a dampness in the air that promised rain and chilled her bones. Julia was grateful for the fur-lined boots Rane had found for her. Must have belonged to a Stenda because the mijlockers had chunky square feet that made hers look like rails. They were a healthy bunch for the feudal society they lived in. An eon ago when she was working with Simon, he’d got her interested in the middle ages where the lives of the peasants and the poor were best described as nasty, brutish and short, however it offended her writer’s ear to use such an overworked set of words. Even the older tie-men seemed sturdy enough, no signs of malnutrition. They’d obviously worked hard all their lives; their hands and the way they stood and walked spoke eloquently of that, but they weren’t beaten down or dull-witted. There was one old tie who claimed seventy years; he was alert and active, a gnarled root of a man ready for another seventy if he wasn’t killed in this siege. From the little she’d seen of the way they lived, they had the Biserica, the healwomen and the teachings of the Keepers to thank for that, not only for their medical care but for the emphasis on cleanliness of body and house. And there was always the magic. Simon was fascinated by how that capriciously accessible power had shaped lives here, the subtle and not so subtle differences he was finding in a society with much the same social patterns and degree of technology as those medieval societies he knew so well; whenever he could, he hung around the Biserica library with its impressive collection of hand lettered books and scrolls. The printing press was going to be an eye-opener on this world. Julia grinned as she thought about the subversive role books had always played back home. That’ll shake them up if nothing else does.
The pickup rattled to a stop, letting them off at the huge canvas shelter, where most of the defenders not on the wall spent their time. Heat, laughter, cheerful voices, food smells hit her in the face and gave her a lift as they always did when she came here. Girls were everywhere, eating, serving, collecting plates, running errands, chattering, sitting in groups working not too hard on fletching arrows; Stenda girls, lanky and blonde; minarks, all shades of brown with tilted black eyes and brown hair ranging from fawn to chocolate; black girls from the Fenakel, green-scaled sea-girls, other types she couldn’t name, not knowing the world well enough; but most of all there were the slim brown girls from the mijloc, dozens of them, ranging from twelve to sixteen, a little frightened at what was happening, but coping with it, the brightest, and most spirited girls of the Plain, many of them here against the will of their kin. Not all nice and sweet. There were greedy girls, lazy girls, quarrelsome ones, arrogant ones, girls with the need to dominate all around them, sly girls and sneaks, yet with all their flaws even the worst of them were fiercely determined to defend the Biserica, sure with the simplicity and arrogance of youth that they were going to win. Julia found it exhilarating to step into that bubbling mix, though she knew the dream for what it was. She picked up a tray and followed Rane to one of the quieter corners.
Meat stew in a rich brown sauce; a mound of white cillix, a ricelike grain with a sweeter, nuttier flavor; a cup of steaming strong cha; a hunk of fresh bread torn from a round loaf. Julia ate with appreciation and dispatch, not talking until the edge was taken off her appetite. Finally she set the tray on the ground beside her and sat sipping at the cha, a little sleepy with the weight of the food. She turned to Rane. “What are you going to do when this is over?”
Rane looked out over the noisy scene. The corner of her wide mouth curled up. “I’m tired of rambling. Think I’ll move in with your folk if you all don’t mind.”
“Not here?”
“Too much of my life buried here.”
5
The pounding continued. Day and night waves of men rolled against the wall; the black-clad Follower-conscripts, grim but clumsy and ill-trained; whooping Majilarni, galloping in swift arcs at the wall, loosing their arrows in a deadly rain; sullen Sankoise, fighting with half their minds on the norits driving them at the wall. Each day there were more dead among the defenders, more names engraved on the roll of the dead in the Watchhall: meien, Stendas, mijlockers, exiles male and female-a slow attrition, every wounded fighter salvaged if he or she reached Serroi alive. The healer lived in a steady daze, touching, touching, a green glass figurine, the earth fire constant in her as long as she walked betwe
en the pallets of the wounded. Girls died too, skewered by stray arrows shot blind from behind rough walls hastily slapped together to hide them from the seeking rifles. Girls dropped exhausted, burned by the fat fires, wounded, their exuberance settling to a sullen stubbornness. Twice during that tenday small bands of Sleykynin came creeping down the cliffs, trying to get down behind the Biserica so they could strike at the Shawar. Each time the watching sensitives gave warning, then guided a pickup with fighters packed into the open back to the place where the Sleykynin were descending. Pinned against the rough stone by a battery powered searchlight, the Sleykynin died, all of them, five the first time, three the second.
The first night raid, the exile Ram saw the traxim circling overhead and knew enough about them to know they were transmitting images back to the norits. He hissed and lifted his rifle, but meie Tebiz put her hand on his arm. “No use,” she said. “Don’t waste time. Or ammunition.”
Three nights later in a localized rainstorm that killed the fires under the fat kettles, Majilarni came at the east end of the wall, hurling their short lances into high arcs that came whistling down among the defenders. Near the great gates several squads of mercenaries came at a trot toward the wall, linked rawhide shields turning the crossbow quarrels, further protected by a rain of shafts from the longbowmen on the hills behind them, their companion moardats flying at the embrasures between flights of arrows, slashing at the defenders with poisoned claws, diving at eyes and throat, distracting them, making it harder than ever to stop the ladders from going into place until once again exiles and meien combined, meien swords holding off the moardats while exile rifles opened large gaps on the linked shields over the heads of the advancing mercenaries. At the same time a clot of Sleykynin were creeping toward the west end of the wall and got unnoticed to its base. They were swinging their grapples by the time Hern spotted them with the nightscope and sent Angel and his fighters racing along the wall to reinforce the thinned-out defenders, (half their number had gone rushing to fight by the west tower). Flashlights flared, catching the Sleykynin unprepared and awkwardly placed, the meien skewering half of them, the other half dropping away and scurrying back to the shelter of the hills.
The pickups rattled back and forth, carrying the wounded to the field hospital, the motorcycles whooroomed back and forth carrying the medics, while meien, Stenda, mijlockers and exiles fought off the Sankoise who endured for a short while then fled to huddle round their fires and curse the meien and curse their masters and curse the rain, the cold, the night. In the center of the wall the mercenaries got their ladders up and came flooding onto the walkway and the fighting was fierce, hand to hand on slippery stone, in rain and dark, a muddy wet cold confusion of hacking and grunts and screams and curses, until…
Roar of motors, cut off suddenly, great white eyes of light suddenly unleashed, exiles pouring out of trucks, a sudden blatting of horns. The defenders drop to hands and knees and crawl away if they can do so without being slaughtered or drop flat, or retreat however they can. Seconds after that a chattering sound from big guns mounted on the backs of the trucks, louder and more menacing than the quiet sharp snaps of the rifles. And far deadlier, chopping the Ogogehians off their feet except for the few quick enough to guess what is coming and drop below the guardwall instants after the defenders drop. The rest coming up the ladders retreat quickly and pass in good order to the shelter of the hills. Then it is over. Seconds only. Half a dozen heartbeats, half a hundred men dead or dying, lying in bloody heaps in the fringes of the blinding white light.
A few of the defenders were clipped by the bullets, but none was seriously wounded. They drove the last mercenaries back over the walls and threw the dead down on them. Another fifteen minutes, and the wall was cleared.
While these attacks were holding the attention of Hern and the greater part of the Biserica defense, two more bands of Sleykynin were making their way down the rugged slopes on both sides of the wide waist of the valley, many stadia beyond the cliffs where the first attempts were made, gambling that Hern and Yael-mri would have committed all their forces to the wall and, even if they hadn’t, that there was no way they could get fighters there in time to stop the infiltration. The sides of the valley at that point were almost as steep as at the cliffs, the going almost as treacherous, but the stone was broken, with bits of soil trapped in tiny terraces, scraggly brush and spears of prickly broom scattered about, clumps of dry grass, much more cover, certainly enough for these veteran assassins to come down without showing more than an occasional patch of dulled leather. They moved carefully and confidently, without noise as a matter of pride though there was no one but themselves to hear any sounds they made.
The sensitives smelled them out and warned Yael-mri.
After kicking a chair across the room and demanding where she was going to find fighters, she used the teletalk to round up some of the wounded who were still able to get about, pulled two pickups from the mercy runs and went to the arms dump to look over what she had while they armed themselves, two bands of six, a mixture drawn from all those helping to defend the Biserica. “The sense-web locates them about halfway down the valley,” she said. “You’ve got to get them all. If any of them get past you… if they get to the Shawar… She looked at the battered weary fighters and sighed. Exile Pandrashi, muscle and sinew like polished stone showing through his torn shirt, a bandage on one arm, a still oozing scrape that went up the side of his square face. Young exile Rudy with a bloody scab on his knee visible through torn jeans, the top of one ear gone, but his eyes were bright with excitement and his gap-tooth grin cut his thin face in half. Meie Asche-helai, left shoulder heavily bandaged, hair still clotted with the blood of the man she killed; she was right-eyed and could use a crossbow in spite of her wound. Meie Jiddellin her shieldmate. Stenda boy Pormonno, a rag about one leg, another about his upper arm, cuddling a bundle of short javelins against his side. Sensitive Afonya Less, horror dark in her dark brown eyes, her mouth set in a stubborn line, lips pinched together so hard they were invisible. The sensitives hated these hunts, feeling every wound, all the hate and fear and rage in the men they tracked, dying every death, but they faced that torment without complaint because they knew what would happen if the Sleykynin got to the Shawar. Yael-mri made a mental note to see the Ammu Rin and have sleep drugs ready when the pickups returned. She turned to the second band.
Exile Liz Edelmann, no visible wound but a slightly mad look in her black eyes. (Yael-mri remembered after a moment that Serroi had just finished healing a sword cut in her side that had nearly separated her into two parts.) Ex-Plaz guard Mardian, one of those who’d showed up just before the army poured through the pass; another of Serroi’s patients, an arrow through an artery, almost emptying him before the trainee healwoman could stop the bleeding. Meie Vapro, meie Nurii, both minor wounds. Nurii was limping but not in much pain from the scrape on the side of her leg. Exile Ram, his dusky face composed, his slight body relaxed, an anticipatory smile that found no echo in his eyes, another of the just-healed, Yael-mri didn’t know how bad the wound had been, though she did know it was the fifth time he’d needed Serroi’s touch. She looked away from him not quite sure she could endure that kind of buffeting and return for more. We’ll all go more than a little odd before this insanity has finished with us. Shayl, I hate this, using them until they’ve nothing left inside. She sucked in a breath. “You’ve got to get them all,” she repeated firmly. “There’s no one else.” She scanned the faces and abandoned the rest of her speech; they knew the urgency better than she did. “Maiden bless you,” she said. “And keep you from the beast.”
Since the searchlights were tied up at the wall, Cordelia Gudon (put in charge of stores because of her phenomenal memory and her ability to organize on the run) hunted them out some parachute flares and flare guns, scowled with affectionate concern at them, then went rummaging through boxes and brought out some grenades. “In case you have to get close,” she said. “I heard those Sl
eyks can be real bastards.”
After a drive down the valley that none of them wanted to remember later, the pickups split and raced, shuddering over the rough ground, to the places where the assassins were coming down, catching them on the last slope still about a hundred feet up and coming across bare stone. When the flares went off, Pandrashi counted six in the east-side band, Liz counted five in the west-side band. On both sides of the valley the meien, exiles and others killed three Sleykynin before their dazzled eyes cleared and they scrambled for cover. When the flares died, the sensitives uncurled from their pain-battered knots and went grimly along with the hunters as they tracked down the wounded and finished them off, a dangerous and ugly task. A wounded Sleykyn fighting for his life-or fighting to take as many with him as he can-is the deadliest beast in this world or any other. Rudy went past some, low half-dead brush with a bit of shadow that seemed too meager to hide a chini pup, and died from a poison knife thrown with deadly accuracy, while Asche-helai came too close behind him to escape from the velater whip that wrapped around her neck, cutting it to the bone before Pandrashi put a single bullet through the Sleykyn’s spine. Two dead in two seconds. The other Sleykynin fell to the guns without getting close enough to take anyone with them. On the west side, the last Sleykyn there spent his strength and will to reach the sensitive Magy Fa, killing her with his hands an instant before Liz blew his skull to bloody shards. She stood over him staring down at him until Ram touched her arm. “Five out of five,” he said. He looked down at Magy Fa lying in a tangled embrace with her slayer. “No more nightmares. That’s something anyway.”