Changer’s Moon dos-3

by Jo Clayton

  Liz drew her fingers absently along the rifle’s stock. “Looks to me like we changed worlds without changing anything else.”

  Ram shrugged. “In this place, Doubter, we make a difference; where we were, we made none.”

  Liz made a small violent gesture, then strode off toward the pickup.

  6

  Gaunt and half-starved, Tuli prowled along the backside of the army, Ajjin and Allazo beside her running boldly in their four-foot forms. They had it down to a game now, a game they played with fierce pleasure, a game they always won because the demon beasts seemed unable to learn its rules. Coperic and the others of his band were scattered along the line of the army, preferring to stay as far from demons and norits as they could manage, whether they were ambushing stray soldiers or cutting out rambuts to butcher for their meals. The food they’d brought was gone, what game might roam here in ordinary times had retreated to safer, more silent slopes. Tuli and Coperic and the rest of the band lived off rambuts now, sharing them from time to time with the silent deadly Kulaan who’d come south to avenge their linas and who were going to continue their killing as long as they could crawl. Or with the remnants of the outcast bands, hungry ragged men and boys as feral as a pack of addichinin. Rambut meat was stringy and tough with little fat to flavor it, but it kept them going.

  Most of the mijlockers were gone. After the first tenday half of them were dead and the rest were beginning to starve; they’d begun to melt away, leaving the dead behind to be buried hastily in the muck by work parties from the army. The futility of what they were doing and the lack of food sapped their will, so they went back to the deserted tars and empty villages to find what shelter and food they could and sit listlessly waiting for the war to end. Or they’d gone to the Havens to help fight off the Kapperim. As Hars and Teras must have done. Though she’d watched for them, she hadn’t seen either of them again. What little news she’d picked up from the mijlockers sharing, fire and half-raw meat with Coperic’s band was not comforting. The Kapperim had gathered and were attacking all the outcast Havens, trying to wipe them out. Some nights she dreamed of her family and cried in her sleep because she wasn’t with them. She fretted about not being with them, wondering what possible good she was doing here, helping Coperic flea and Bella flea and Biel flea and Ryml, Lehat, Karal, Sosai, Charda, Pyvin and Wohpa fleas take tiny bites from the flank of the monster that darkened the hillsides. But there was always the Game to take her mind off brooding and under the brooding there was the calm knowledge that she’d be doing far less if she was where her father could keep an eye on her.

  She settled into the shade of some brush on a hillside above the section of wall where the Sankoise were. Coperic had been concentrating on the Majilarni and the Sankoise, pricking them into disaffection. During the first days of the siege when norits were falling like dying moths, Coperic and all of them had crept with near impunity among the skittish Sankoise, picking off one after another as they ran for cover. They were mostly town-bred men or sailors conscripted off Sankoise merchant ships. The wild country around them disturbed, even frightened, them. They were intensely superstitious; coming from a mage-ridden land, they saw omens in every turn of a leaf and the deaths, the throats cut, the men strangled, or left with skulls crushed, the rambuts lost, the equipment destroyed, all this worked on them until they began to settle into the mud like rotting logs. Kole was forced to call on his shrinking force of norits, leaving a good number of them with the Sankoise to weave alarum spells about the camps so the raids stopped and the men could sleep in such peace as they could find on the cold and uncomfortable slopes.

  Tuli sat on her hillside watching them with considerable satisfaction as they wandered unhappily about, or knelt on blankets gambling or sought escape in sleep. The day was coming when even their centuries of conditioned nor-fear would no longer drive them to the wall. She lost her contentment when she looked toward the great Gate. Nekaz Kole was getting the walking towers built far faster than she liked. She scowled, got to her feet and went back to hunting demon beasts. That was a danger she could do something about.

  7

  A full day after the towers were completed, they sat on their rollers, three tapering fingers of wood pointed at the sky; early the next morning Ogogehians brought teams of massive draft hauhaus to them, six in each hitch. With hauhaus digging their split hooves into the mud and shoving with mighty shoulders against the harness, with norits riding beside each team, to turn aside all missiles, the towers began to inch forward, rocking precariously even at that creeping pace, getting stuck repeatedly in the slush left behind by the attacking rain until one of the Four got impatient and pulled the water from the soil in a flash of steam and a mighty hissing. Slowly, inexorably, the towers moved toward the wall.

  8

  Hern dropped the binoculars, letting them hang about his neck, and swung around on his stool until he faced the others gathered in the small, square chamber at the top of the west gate tower. He filled a glass with water from the jug on the, table beside him, drank thirstily, set the lass down, frowned at Yael-mri. “How many dead so far? ‘

  Yael-mri looked at her hands. “One hundred seventeen meien, twelve healer trainees, eight girls, fifty-six Stenda, two hundred thirteen mijlockers, six exiles.” She began kneading at the back of one hand with the fingers of the other. “Almost everyone on or near the wall has been wounded several times, some as many as six or seven, many of them would have died except for Serroi; any we get to her with a flicker of life left she heals.” She rubbed her hands, staring past him out the windowslit at the pale blue of the sky. “She can’t heal memory away. You know my meien, Hern, they’re fighters, they go back on the wall, they have to, but the edge is getting worn off them. And they’re sickened by the killing, the slaughter. They know the need, who better? but there comes a time when the spirit and the flesh rebel.” She made a small cut-off gesture, said nothing more.

  Hern scrubbed his hand across his face. “Supplies?”

  Yael-mri pulled her brooding gaze off the empyrean blue. “Arrows are a problem. We’re salvaging what we can from the shafts shot at us, but even with the girls working in shifts on fletching and pointing, we’re expending more than we can replace. Doing better with the crossbow quarrels, they don’t require as much time or skill. Fuel’s no problem. We had time to get in a good supply of coal. The fat fires and, the food fires won’t die for lack of coal or wood. Food-with a good harvest and a year to prepare, we had time and used it. Even after the influx of all those extra girls we won’t starve. Herbs, salves, other medicines, holding out fairly well. Serroi again. She makes medicines unnecessary in the more serious cases.” She smiled wearily. “You know well enough our only shortage is of trained fighters. Kole can’t starve us out, but he can whittle down our numbers until he can just walk over us.”

  Hern nodded. “Even with the Shawar intact. The wall’s holding him right now. Georgia, Anoike, your folk and supplies?”

  Georgia glanced at Anoike. With a flip of her hand she passed the answer to him. “As Yael-mri said, six of us are dead, three of my bunch, two from Angel’s, a driver who caught an arrow in the throat; her bad luck, wrong place, wrong time. Five horses dead or wounded. Ammo about half gone, some grenades left, other stuff we haven’t used yet. Grenier’s drugs, he scraping bottom, but he didn’t have no big supply to start.” Georgia grinned. “If you want to see a happy man, a whole new pharmacopoeia to play with. Fuel for the trucks going to be a problem if this goes on much longer. Nona, she’s a research chemist, and Bill, he used to build his own racing cars, they’re working on some way of restructuring the engines to run on alcohol. Last report, they making good progress, thought they could experiment on one of the trucks when things get slow. That’s about it.” he looked at Anoike.

  “You said it, Dom. The wall holding them.”

  “Right. But we’ve got a problem. The walking towers.” Anoike crossed her arms, wrinkled her nose. “Thought that why you got
us up here. How long?”

  “Sundown.”

  “Hunh.” She poked her elbow into Georgia’s ribs. “Maybe you ready now to use those rockets.” Her hazel eyes filled with laughter, she turned back to Hern. “He a skrinch with them. I keep telling him Kole the thing holds them out there together. Pull him and they fall apart. But he sitting on those rockets like a broody hen on a clutch of eggs.”

  Georgia shook his head. “He keeps that Nor too close. I figure we got one good shot with the rockets; if we try for him and that Nor shifts them aside, then we’ve lost the chance to finesse some advantage from the others we got. Those towers, they’re different. Take them out and have a hot try for Kole. We miss him this time, no sweat, we get the towers and maybe some more norits.”

  Yael-mri cleared her throat; when they looked at her, she said, “He’s right. The Nor with Kole and three more out there are only a hair away from the challenge duels that could lift several of them into full power. Take no chances with that Four.”

  Hern rubbed at the back of his neck, feeling tired. He’d been tired for days. Sitting up here, separated from his fighters, chained to the binoculars and the teletalk, directing the battles like some botso master moving his pieces about a board. Watching men and women die when they rushed to follow his orders. He was angry, frustrated, tired, occasionally despairing. He missed Serroi terribly; more than once he was tempted to send for her just to talk a little, to get away from the unending strain, to touch again the warmth between them and feel human again, but he didn’t give in to that need. Her presence down there meant lives saved and he needed those lives. There were times, especially late at night, when he was stretched out on the pallet in the corner, a meie at the window charged to wake him if she spotted any movement below, there were times when he felt like walking down the stairs and away from the wall, away from the fighting and the responsibilities oppressing him, but he knew also he was the one person who could order events without getting an argument or mutiny from every part of his motley force. He was as locked-in here as Serroi was with her healing. At his lowest moments he wondered if he would ever escape, if the mijloc would claim him for the last part of his life as it had for the first. No, he told himself. No. But he could feel them all leaning on him, depending on him, everyone behind the wall and out in the desolation Floarin had made of the Plain. And the exiles who were fighting so powerfully for him, they’d need him too, he was the only one who could see that they got the land and help he’d promised them. He couldn’t walk away, that much of his father he had in him. Heslin, he said to himself in the dark-and it was both a groan and a curse.

  He poured more water and drank, turned to Georgia. “Can you move your launchers into place without alerting the traxim?”

  Georgia frowned. “They’re not that big. Have to be some work on them, takes a few minutes to sight them in on the towers.”

  Anoike touched his arm. “The little pults the meien been using, they worth shit so far, but Kole he got to be expecting the Dom here to try anything he can. Make a lot of fuss getting them moved, I expecting Kole he don’t notice us here and there fussin with the launchers.”

  Hern clicked his fingers against the glass, then nodded. “That should do it.”

  Yael-mri sighed. “There’s more bad news, Dom. My sensitives say there are Sleykynin in the valley.”

  “I thought you’d blocked that.”

  “Apparently bands on both sides of the valley have been working round through the mountains toward the southern narrows. The ones we killed peeled off the main parties, testing us, I think. As far as I can tell, they came down beyond the sensitives’ reach and have been creeping toward us the past two days.” She sighed. “I hate to ask it, dom Hern, but I need hunting parties and guard shifts. I know we don’t have the fighters. I know everyone’s needed on the wall, but how much good will holding the wall do if the Sleykynin break the Shawar? How long would the wall stand then?” She looked at her hands again. When she spoke it was in a whisper as if she feared to hear what she was saying. “How much good even those will do, I don’t know. I just don’t know. Sleykynin are old hands at games we meien have never played.

  The launchers were slipped onto the wall in the midst of the contrived confusion Anoike had suggested. The three launchers they had were trained upon the three towers, the rockets nested in them. Overhead the traxim whirled about, thick black flocks of demon spies, but they took no special notice of three small knots of purpose in the larger flow. In the tower Hern scanned the army; it was late afternoon, a heavily overcast day that spread a cold gray gloom over the plain outside the wall and the foothills beyond. He could find no trace of Nekaz Kole, but did locate his tent, its fine waterproof silk walls lit from within by lamps and perhaps a charcoal brazier to keep the army’s master warm. He murmured into the teletalk, reporting his observations to Anoike, adding that he saw no point in waiting longer. He flicked to the second channel, glanced down at the scale etched into the stone of the slit, spoke again. “Kole’s tent. Ten degrees west of second tower, estimate this point. Comment?” He listened. “Right. Ready. On three. One. Two. Three.”

  Diminishing hiss, exhaust clouds glowing in gray light. Rockets whispering from the launchers, exploding with no appreciable interval between launch and hit, so close are the towers, three blasts that open out the gloom with sound and glare. The exiles handling the launchers muscle them around, change their aim and shoot off a second flight about two heartbeats after the first.

  Hern grunted with satisfaction as the towers flew into splinters, shifted his gaze to the tents as the next flight converged on them and struck, throwing fire, dirt and stone in a wide circle about the place where the tents had been, the stone and shards from the rocket casing slicing like knives through the surrounding Ogogehians, sending even those hardened mercenaries into a panic flight. He lifted the teletalk, spoke into it. “Go. Get whatever you can.”

  More of the rockets streaked out, their flights diverging from the center. Though Sankoise and Ogogehian and Majilarni fled the terrible things that flew at them with paralyzing swiftness and slew by hundreds, not one by one, only the lucky survived. The first flight hit among the Sankoise, slaying many, wounding more. The second sprayed through the orderly camps of the mercenaries, but the third flight veered suddenly upward, curled to the east and exploded some minutes later among the mountain tops, almost too far off to see or hear. Hern cursed fervently, spoke again into the teletalk. “Shut down. No use wasting more of those. That should hold them a while.”

  9

  Nekaz Kole wasn’t in his tent, but sitting at a shaman’s fire in a Majilarni shaman’s hutch dealing with a potential rebellion. The Majilarni were tired of this interminable siege that was getting them killed without any of the usual pleasures of war. Other times they could hear the moans of the wounded and the dying, could see the city behind the wall begin to suffer, other times they could race their rambuts around the walls and yell mocking things at the defenders, boast what they’d do to them when the city fell, howl with laughter at their stupidity when they tried sending out embassies to cut deals with the shaman and the elders, other times they could play with sorties and smugglers and savor the growing desperation behind the walls. Other times they could ride off more or less when they chose, loaded down with loot and slaves when the city finally capitulated. They could see no profit in this business. The wall was too thick, too high, too long; the defenders were too deadly with their shafts and those tiny pellets that dug right through you and maybe wounded your mount too, that sought you out impossibly far from the wall. That wasn’t fair. You died and you didn’t even get to call your curses on your killer because she was too far to hear you. And that was another thing. They were fighting women. Oh, they’d seen some men’s faces now and then, but they knew what this place was: it was where they trained those abominations that played at being men. How could a man gain honor fighting women? The Majilarni fighters were turning ugly. The shaman was gett
ing nervous. Clans had turned on their shamans before. If he was negligent about bringing them to game and graze, or milking water into dry wells, or if he got them beaten too badly in contests with enemy clans, if he led them to defeat before the walled cities too often, then the shaman got roasted over a slow fire, fed to the herd chini and his apprentice set in his place. That is, if the apprentice stuck around long enough to get caught, in which case he wasn’t much of a shaman, and would soon follow his master into chinin bellies. The shaman squatting across the fire from Nekaz Kole knew the smell of revolt; he cursed the day he’d let ambition trap him into this business. Though he feared the Nearga nor, he was on the point of leading his folk away, to take them on raids up through the mijloc and across Assurtilas in hopes that loot and proper fighting would put them into a better mood.

  The talk went on for a while more, but Kole wasn’t a man to dribble away his authority in futile argument. He cut off the discussion and ducked out of the hutch; before he could get to his mount, the rockets hit the walking towers, then his tents, then started ravaging his army. The Nor at his side cursed, then spoke a WORD that shivered the air about him. The last of the flaming missiles curved up and away, exploding somewhere among the mountain tops behind them. Kole watched that, then scowled across the slopes at the devastation where his tent had been. Being that close to losing his life shook him, not because it was a brush with death, but because even the Nor wouldn’t have saved him if they’d both been in that tent; there wouldn’t have been time for him to act. Chance had saved him this time. Another time it might destroy him. He had no control over that sort of event. Luck. The idea disturbed him. He strode to his gold rambut, swung into the saddle and rode at a slow walk toward the heart of his army to look over the damage to his veterans, the Nor silent, riding a half-length behind him. There was one aspect of the destruction he was quietly applauding. Floarin was gone; he’d left her huddling over a fire after listening for an hour to her querulous demands for information and for quick action to end the war. She was puffed to ash now or blown into shreds of charred flesh. He’d deferred to her since she was provisioner and nominal paymaster, but he knew well enough where the real power lay. She’d developed into an irritant impossible to ignore, equally impossible to endure. And she’d started getting ideas about him, hovered around him as much as she could, constantly touching him, pressing against him, even trying to force her way into his tent. That she disgusted him and the thought of coupling with her turned his stomach he kept to himself. He evaded her during the day, put guards around his tent at night. In Ogogehia there are spiders that grow as broad as a man’s hand, ghastly, hairy bags of ooze able to leap higher than a man’s head and poisonous enough to make a strong man deathly sick. The females are the big ones, males are elusive, shy and smooth-skinned, dinner for the females once the mating is over. In his eyes Floarin was as disgusting as one of those spiders, feeding on her husband, feeding any male that got close enough for her to inject her poison. He smiled at the scattered embers of the tents and felt a strong relief flood through him, with the result that he silently promised those inside the wall as generous a settlement as he could wring out of the Nearga Nor. He watched the embers dying to black, heard the wounded groaning, and coveted those weapons. Where Hern had got hold of them was something he was going to be very interested in discovering. With them in his arsenal, well, there would be very little he couldn’t have for the asking. Once this was over. He bent forward and patted the neck of his nervously sidling rambut. Time for Vuurvis. He swept his eyes along the wall, scowled at the gate towers. Start loading the melons tomorrow. Hit the walls first, then the towers, get rid of spotters, then burn through the gates. Once he got enough inside the wall, it was over. He kneed the rambut into a faster walk. The majilarni were lost but he didn’t need them. Vuurvis was enough.