Act of Will wh-1

by Andrew James Hartley

  “Then why?. ”

  “I don’t know, Will,” Mithos answered hastily, adding with a touch of irritation, “Now go to sleep. We have another day’s ride ahead of us.”

  Since I was avoiding Orgos (having nearly got us all killed earlier made me unwilling to deal with my combat instructor), I buried my face in a pillow of rolled-up tunics and tried to sleep. I knew that I would dream and I knew that there would be red-cloaked soldiers with featureless helms riding through the fire of those dreams. There would also be laughter and accusing fingers pointed at me. I’d been having dreams like that ever since I met these idiots.

  The worst thing about sleeping outside is that you always wake at dawn when the sun hits your face. Orgos had been on the last watch and was now laying out a breakfast of the mediocre bits and pieces brought from Adsine augmented by wild blackberries and stream water which he had boiled over a tiny fire. After we had eaten we went to the still-smoldering village. We found a few charred arrows with traces of red flight feathers and a confused scattering of hoof-prints. Mithos crawled about for a while and then said, mainly to Orgos, “They came from the north end of the village, close to the forest line. I’d say there were about twenty of them but it’s hard to tell. They rode up and down the street and then some of them dismounted and entered the buildings.”

  That, I didn’t want to think about. I was dealing with things rather better than I had expected, but I suppose that was because last night’s hellish encounter had taken place in a village full of red light, not this blackened ruin of frames and burnt corpses. Oh yes, there were plenty of those. I figured the count had another twenty-five to add to his death toll, and there wasn’t a hint that a single raider had fallen.

  We tracked the hooves until they came to the edge of the wood, where the ground was too hard and cushioned with pine needles for there to be any further trail. The sun had shone steadily by all accounts for a week now and there had been no sign of rain for longer, so it was only the sand that the horses had kicked up that had enabled us to follow them this far. The horsemen had come and done what they obviously did so well, and then left without a trace.

  Still, it was odd. Hard ground or no hard ground, there were tracks throughout the village, and there were occasional signs of where the raiders had come in and gone out, but a hundred yards or so beyond the village? Nothing. No sign that anyone had been there for weeks. It was as if they had just disappeared.

  You’d think that this would have been a nicely ominous portent, an opportunity for the party to abandon the whole mission and slink quietly back to Stavis, but that didn’t seem to occur to anyone.

  SCENE XXV Seaholme

  Somehow, Greycoast was luckier than Shale. We hadn’t been traveling long that day before the ground started to look greener, and we were soon crossing fields of grazing sheep.

  Mithos rode Tarsha, the overpriced bundle of muscle and mane they had spent our reward on.

  “Are you doing all right, Will?” he asked, apropos of nothing.

  “Of course,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “No reason,” he said. A moment later he added, “When we get to Seaholme we will have to organize a large defensive force and be ready for anything. No more blind terror or curious solo forays, all right?”

  “All right.”

  As if that was something I had planned. Has telling anyone not to panic ever helped in the slightest? No one chooses to panic. No one says, “Oh, what a good idea: panic will not achieve much in this situation, so I opt to stay calm instead.”

  I swear, they might be strong and courageous, but sometimes they talked like they knew nothing about anything that really mattered.

  It was late afternoon when we reached Seaholme, and Duke Raymon was waiting for us.

  “You have made good time,” he boomed. “You have no idea how reassured I am to see you. The barges are expected around nine o’clock tomorrow evening. There’s a sizable force awaiting your instructions.”

  “How many?” said Mithos, swinging down from his horse.

  “A hundred,” Raymon answered. “Sixty cavalry and forty infantry.”

  “Excellent,” said Mithos warmly. “I had not dared to hope for so many.”

  “Frankly,” said the duke, “I can’t really spare them. But this is an important cargo and worth the extra caution.”

  “If the raiders are as careful as everyone suggests,” added Mithos, “they will not risk an attack on so large a force.”

  The duke nodded, but he didn’t say anything. I don’t think anyone else noticed, but it bothered me.

  The following day I dressed carefully and tried to carry myself with the bearing of one who knew what he was doing. It wasn’t easy, partly because I didn’t, and partly because Seaholme was a maze of ancient streets packed with fishermen and soldiers from the moment the sun came up. I felt almost as lost and inadequate as I had in Stavis, but this time I had to strut around and look composed. I gave it a shot, throwing my shoulders back and stalking about like a rooster. Bill the tactician. The renowned General William Hawthorne. The names didn’t feel right, like I was wearing someone else’s clothes and they were all too big. I remembered the riders in the burning village and, thinking that I didn’t want the responsibility of arranging how we faced them, dropped the military swagger, hunched my shoulders, and tried to keep a low profile. For that part I was a natural.

  The soldiers looked good in their blue tunics and capes, but their armor was light, and they lacked, even to my inexperienced eye, an air of efficiency and confidence. As we were introduced to the platoon captains I couldn’t help noticing a pair of young soldiers handling two-handed spears as if they were unsure what they were supposed to do with them. Still, they looked impressive from a distance, and maybe that would be enough.

  In the harbor the myriad fishing boats had been moved to clear the dock for when the barges came in. Drawn up in vast warehouses close by, ten large wagons stood empty and waiting. In fact, waiting was what we did a lot of that day. Mithos and Orgos looked over the troops and drew up plans with their leaders, but they looked less happy at the end of it than they had at the beginning.

  “I don’t see what more we can do,” Mithos said as we sat by the docks, eating grilled fish, “but if the raiders call our bluff and attack. ”

  “What’s that over there?” I said.

  “What? The lighthouse?” said Orgos, squinting in the direction I was pointing, but only getting as far as the round towerlike structure that dominated the harbor. “It’s used to guide ships into the port. ”

  “No, further down the coast. It looks like another port.”

  It turned out that the other port had been called Shelton. I say “had been” because, according to Duke Raymon, it was now a ghost town, and had been since the bay had been closed off to sea traffic by an immense sandbar. The people had just shut up shop and moved away. It was exactly the same as what had happened to Shale, but here the fishermen had just moved a couple of miles down the coast to Seaholme.

  “It’s like the town here, but on a smaller scale,” said the duke. “Why?”

  “I was just thinking,” I said, “that if the raiders were massing for an assault, they would need to do it in a place where they wouldn’t be noticed-”

  “Will’s right,” said Lisha hurriedly. “We should ride over immediately.” She paused and added, for the benefit of the duke, “Don’t you think, Mithos?”

  It took us less than ten minutes to ride over to the derelict port of Shelton. It was populated only by terns and gulls that swooped and dived at us as we walked our horses through its empty streets, fixing us with their hard, unafraid little eyes as if ensuring we were in no doubt as to who owned the place. The entire town was caked with the greenish white and grey of their droppings, and the air rang with their raucous voices.

  We split up and searched the streets of silent shops. Garnet and I wandered along the harbor and poked our heads into decaying boathouses. The wa
ter had receded from the seawall and, farther out, you could see where it shallowed to nothing, barely covering a great reef of sand, dotted with the bones and split hulks of the ships that didn’t get out in time. We found nothing but puffins and razorbills nesting in the boathouse walls, and air heavy with the scent of rotting seaweed. We tried the lighthouse door. It was open, and we spiraled our way up the stone tower to the open top with its wood-filled brazier and its view of Shelton. There was nothing to see but the sister lighthouse down the coast in Seaholme. I leaned disconsolately over the guano-caked side, harried by hovering terns and great, screaming gulls. The noise was giving me a headache.

  It was evening before we got back to Seaholme, where the dock-hands were amassing slowly on the quay and rolling out the wagons with studied caution. I had actually thought I was being useful, for once, but since we had nothing to show for our afternoon bird-watching expedition I resigned myself to my usual role: useless Bill, Will the waste of space.

  The infantry had been sent in groups of ten to hold the main roads down to the harbor. The cavalry stood close by. Everyone looked anxious and a little bored, including the horses, which chewed on their oats, waiting for something to happen.

  We dined in our tavern on local cod with rice and lemon juice. Lisha gave us a last-minute summary of the situation. “Mithos, you will oversee the loading of the wagons with me. Orgos, you stay with the infantry. Garnet and Renthrette, join the cavalry. Will, you are to carry messages between all the other units.”

  Great. Will the errand boy. I looked out of the window, noting how quickly it had darkened. It was now half past eight and the last of the sun had disappeared ten or fifteen minutes ago. Mithos was talking: “There are two large barrels of seawater on the roof of each wagon. The raiders can’t expect to get away with a cargo like this, so they will probably try to burn it on the road. We should hack the barrels open as soon as the raiders appear and drench the coal: drown it. If one of those burning arrows gets in. What’s the matter, Will?”

  “Burning. ” I repeated, getting to my feet.

  “What?” said Lisha.

  “Garnet and I went up the lighthouse today,” I said. “The one in Shelton. The brazier-”

  “Had wood in it,” said Garnet, getting to his feet. He looked even paler than usual.

  “The town is deserted,” I said, “but the lighthouse brazier is stocked with new, dry timber. The raiders aren’t going to attack the wagons at all.”

  “They are going to lure the barges into the wrong port-” said Garnet.

  “And wreck them on the sandbar,” I concluded. “They aren’t going to burn the coal. They are going to drown it.”

  SCENE XXVI The lighthouse

  Take the horses and get over to Shelton,” shouted Lisha, “except Orgos. I’ll send cavalry. The barges will be in sight of the lighthouses any minute now, so move fast. If they are going to light the Shelton beacon, they’ll also have to keep the Seaholme lighthouse dark. Orgos and I will deal with that.”

  I rode as fast as I could, but I couldn’t keep up with the others. By the time I reached the foot of the lighthouse they were waiting, holding the door slightly ajar. I dismounted shakily, and Garnet nodded silently towards six horses trimmed with crimson that were tethered in the dark by the tower.

  There was a sudden flare and I looked up to see the beacon atop the lighthouse ablaze. Moments later the bright orange spot of light that flickered farther up the coast, the light that was to guide the barges into Seaholme, died.

  There was only one door into the tower, and we had no idea if the raiders knew we were here. There was only one way up: the tight, dark, and easily defended spiral staircase.

  “I wish Orgos were with us,” Mithos murmured as he pushed the door open. “All right, let’s go. Quick and quiet. Hand-to-hand weapons only. I’ll lead, then Garnet. Then Will. Renthrette, cover the rear.”

  At the top the fire roared, drowning out all other sound. I looked over Garnet’s shoulder into the tower and up the staircase. It was dark and narrow in there.

  Mithos vaulted up the stairs and was quickly around the corner and out of sight, Garnet at his heels, his ax blade sparkling dully. Then I went. Then Renthrette. We were halfway up when I heard a door below us open, its shrunken timbers scraping on the stone floor. Renthrette glanced up at me and gestured to keep going. I pushed into Garnet and urged him up the spiral. There was a cough from below, and a snatch of conversation resounded up the pipelike stairwell. Two of them behind us. At least.

  Renthrette slapped at my legs, pushing me higher and faster as the voices began to ascend. And then we came to a halt. Above me, Mithos readied himself, touched by the yellowish light of the beacon that fell down the first four or five steps. Garnet raised his shield and huddled closer to him, the muscles of his calves taut, his knees bent and ready to spring. Below, Renthrette took one more step up and then turned her back on me, her sword arm drawn back and ready.

  The first soldiers rounded the corner below at about the same moment that Mithos leapt out of the top of the stairwell. I felt Garnet pause for a moment before he followed him out with a wordless cry of fury. Below, I saw a crimson-crested helm appear in the dark as Renthrette lunged. The tip of her sword glanced off the raider’s armor, and, as he hesitated, I dragged at her tunic from behind, pulling her upwards after me. If there were four of them on the top, then Mithos and Garnet would need all the help they could get. And anything was better than being trapped like a rat in the dark stairwell, enemies above and below.

  I’d only gotten two steps higher when the soldier below recovered from his surprise and came after us, drawing his weapon. I took another step up and found my head in the open air, my ears suddenly filled with the roar of fire and the confusion of combat. I leapt up the last few stairs, my sword and shield extended in sudden terror. Maybe I should have stayed in the staircase after all.

  One of the raiders lay crumpled by the wall, his cloak spilling out like blood. Garnet was hacking at one who was parrying with his scyax. Two others had pinned Mithos against the raging brazier. I moved towards one of them cautiously and he turned, heaving his huge axlike blade at me. I dived to the side and the weapon swung wildly, catching Mithos’s other adversary in the waist. The wounded man doubled up and Mithos sprang past him, seizing the scyax-wielder by the throat.

  Garnet made a feint attack with his ax and then cut at his enemy’s shoulder, but the raider dodged and struck out with his scyax. It caught Garnet’s forearm and opened up a long gash that made him cry out and drop his ax. Renthrette, who was emerging from the stairwell backwards, wheeled and released a shout of anguish.

  Her brother had raised his shield in front of him and was sheltering behind it, agony contorting his features. The raider cut at him again with the scyax, and Garnet, taking all the weight of the strike on his shield, shuddered and fell back towards the crackling brazier. I was with him in two strides. The raider sensed my approach and turned to face me.

  I lunged, and, as he pulled his scyax across his chest, ready to swing, something Orgos had taught me kicked in. I dropped the tip of my blade under his parry and it connected. It was a weak strike, nothing like enough to pierce his breastplate, but as the sword kicked in my hand I lost my balance and fell forwards. Suddenly my face was inches from his helm and I could see blue eyes through the eye slits and a misty stone like an opal set into the bronze between them, glowing orange in the firelight.

  I saw the panicked look in his eyes. He tried to wield the scyax against me, but it was too big and I was too close. I fell upon him and my sword point slid up his cuirass and found the soft flesh of his throat. My body weight carried me forwards. I couldn’t have stopped myself if I’d wanted to.

  Then there was a scream, a long, slow cry that stopped abruptly. One of the raiders had fallen from the tower as he struggled with Mithos. Blood streaming from a broad slash in his cheek, Mithos ran for the stairs, where Renthrette was holding off the last two.

&n
bsp; “The fire! Put the fire out!” he shouted.

  Without another word he flung himself down the steps, sword aloft.

  I tore two of the scarlet cloaks from the dead raiders, plunged them into a bucket of seawater by the brazier, and pulled Garnet to his feet. His arm was bleeding heavily but he said nothing as he seized the edge of the cloaks. We stretched them taut over the brazier as the flames jagged out from underneath. The heat was almost unbearable, but just before I released the steaming fabric, the light died and smoke began pouring out. It was done.

  The last of the raiders fled, seized his horse, and galloped away before Renthrette or Mithos could give chase. I grasped the stone of the tower to hold myself up and inhaled the sea air deeply, staring out into the darkness until the shock and nausea subsided. I was covered in blood, but it wasn’t mine.

  The four of us stood together, wheezing, staring west, waiting. It was almost a minute before we saw the brightening spark of the Seaholme lighthouse flare up to guide the barges in.

  SCENE XXVII The Convoy

  We moved off at first light, a column of dark wagons bristling with spears and escorted by sixty horsemen in royal blue cloaks and silver helms. We looked ready for anything and, suspecting that we weren’t, I hoped that appearances would do the trick. I didn’t know what Mithos had told the duke about how close his precious cargo had been to the bottom of the ocean thanks to a mere handful of the raiders. I had always known they could outnumber us, but I had presumed we could outthink them, like in the stories. I was pretty pleased with myself for figuring out the lighthouse ruse, but I also knew that if we hadn’t caught them off-guard in a space too small for them to swing those bloody ax things, the evening would have gone rather differently.