Burning Tower

by Larry Niven

  “All right. Fullerman, four troopers ahead, four behind. Full kits, all,” Sandry was saying. “We ready? Open the gate. Everyone keep a sharp watch.”

  They could see the torch a few yards away. Secklers and Trebaty were standing well back from something that glowed.

  It looked like a stone bird, smaller than a crow or a chicken. A softly glowing stone terror bird.

  Squirrel took the iron pot from Tower. “Lord Sandry, may I borrow your sword? Thank you.” She used the sword blade to push the object into the pot. “Did you bring the lid? No? Too bad. All right, everyone back inside and keep watch.” Squirrel lifted the pot and held it high above her head, the open top to the sky. “Inside, inside—quick, quick,” she was saying. “Tower, run and get the iron lid to the pot. Run, girl.”

  Tower sprinted in to find the lid. When she got back to the gate everyone was already inside except Squirrel.

  “When I lower this, you put the lid on,” Squirrel said. “Don’t look inside.”

  “All right.” As Squirrel brought the pot down to just above eye level, Tower clapped the lid on. “Done.”

  “Good.”

  Tower used a scrap of rope to tie the lid down. Then they brought it in.

  “But what is it?” Sandry demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Squirrel admitted. “But if it glows, it’s magic, and if it looks like one of those birds, it’s not our magic. Maybe it summons birds. Maybe it lets the god see through the eyes of anyone who looks at it. Maybe anyone who has already looked at it, but I hope not. Do you feel anything? Any of you?”

  Tower thought about it. She had looked at the bird, but only for a moment. “I don’t feel different,” she said.

  Secklers laughed. “Me either, but you’re giving me the shivers.”

  Squirrel nodded. “I think that’s safe now, but I don’t know.” She looked thoughtful. “Something else not good. We’re fighting something more than birds, more than birds and a god. Bane, you said you saw headdresses?”

  “Feathers, ma’am. Like crowns of feathers, but I just got a glimpse—didn’t really see anything.”

  Squirrel nodded thoughtfully. “Spotted Lizard, you ever hear of anything like that?”

  The boy shook his head.

  Squirrel sighed. “I don’t think we’ll get much sleep tonight.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Last Ridge

  No one wanted to sleep. As soon as there was enough light, they broke camp and loaded the wagons. Lordsmen and marines stood ready and never complained about sleeping in their armor.

  The road led steeply down into a green valley. Spotted Lizard studied the way ahead, and said, “I think this is the last valley. That’s Sundusk Ridge ahead. When we get to the top of that, we’ll see Crescent City and the Singwah Sea. I think so, anyway.”

  “What’s in this valley?” Sandry asked.

  “A village. Fresh water,” Spotted Lizard said. “Stream crossing’s got a toll gate, but they don’t charge much and the water’s good, and they have hot soup. It’s a day’s trip up to the next place to cross; better to pay and cross here.”

  Green Stone nodded sourly. There were a lot of places like that. “Nibbled to death,” he said. “Pay and pay and pay and pretty soon, there’s no profits.”

  “I’ll be glad to pay for some good soup,” Burning Tower said.

  Sandry grinned at her and got a smile in return. “Ours has gotten a little thin lately,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

  The road was narrow and twisty. When they rounded a bend, Spotted Lizard stared ahead, then frowned. “I thought this was the last valley,” he said. “But you should be able to see the village from here. And smoke from cookfires—we should be seeing that.”

  Sandry ordered, “Maydreo, ride ahead but be careful. First sign of trouble, you turn around and come back at full gallop.”

  “Yes, sir. Whane, want to come with me?”

  “Sure.” Whane clambered into Maydreo’s chariot. They waved and went ahead at a trot.

  An hour later they were back. “There’s no cookfires because there’s no village,” Maydreo said.

  Spotted Lizard frowned deeply “I sure remember—”

  “You remember right,” Whane said. “There was a village, but it’s gone. Nobody there, house walls knocked down. It’s gone.”

  There had been ten houses in the village. There were remains, foundations, crumpled logs. Part of a log corral. The road ran through the center of what had been the village, and across the stream. A human skull grinned at them from the streambed. There were bones farther downstream.

  Burning Tower took Sandry’s hand and stood close to him. “What happened here?”

  Sandry shook his head. “I think they ran. Or some of them did.”

  “Houses,” Spotted Lizard said. “They knew they’d have to run, so they knocked out a wall on each hogan. To kill the house before an enemy could use it. They had time for that.”

  Sandry felt Burning Tower’s shudder. “Let’s move,” he said.

  “Please,” Tower said. “This is an awful place.” She went back to her wagon.

  Sandry and his troops stood watch as the wagons crossed the stream. The water came up to a standing man’s knees here where the stream broadened. Farther down it narrowed again, and was deeper. As the wagons crossed, Maydreo and Chalker poked among the ruins of one of the houses. Maydreo came out with a bone, a human shinbone with bite marks.

  “Terror birds,” Chalker said. “I’ve seen bones gnawed by coyotes. These are different. That murderin’ beak.”

  Sandry nodded. “When we get across, fill the water bottles,” he said. He looked ahead. The road ran straight up and over the next ridge. He thought he saw a wisp of smoke far ahead in that direction. The last ridge, Spotted Lizard had said. “I hope so,” Sandry said aloud. Chalker looked at him, puzzled, but he didn’t ask.

  When the last wagon was across and the water bottles were filled, Sandry urged his horses into a trot. The road here was easily wide enough to let him pass by and get ahead of the wagon train.

  The last ridge lay ahead.

  They’d crossed the valley by two hours past noon. Sandry waited until the lead elements of the wagon train were approaching the hilltop, then rode ahead to see what was beyond. He topped the ridge.

  Ahead was a broad basin, mostly water. A river snaked across the basin to split into scores of mouths emptying into a sea. Not quite a sea, Sandry thought. He could see across to the other side, except to the southeast where the water went on to the horizon. Below, in a crescent shape along the edge of the closest branch of the river delta, was a city, the river, and then the sea along its east side. Sandry counted more than a hundred houses, some large and some small, but all curiously alike, conical, their doors facing in any of four directions depending on what part of the city they were in. Smoke rose from openings in many of the roofs. A few buildings near the water were different, squares and rectangles alongside the docks. These were larger than the other buildings.

  It was a city under siege.

  A wall ran around the landward edge of the city. For forty paces around an ornate gate, the wall looked like something Lordsmen might build. To left and right, it was no more than a mound with stakes on the top. Men might have done that with their hands.

  A broad road ran from the gate and crossed another broad road in the center of the city. There stood a large round building, taller than any of the others. Next to it, what looked like a staircase rose in a spiral, twenty paces or more, up to nothing at all at its top.

  Outside the wall were the remains of houses. They’d been cones, like the ones inside, but each of them had at least one side ripped open. In every case, it looked as if a crew of men in a hurry had torn part of the wall out and left the logs and rubble where they fell.

  Bright flashes of green and yellow moved among the ruined walls.

  “Terror birds,” he said.

  “Aye, My Lord,” Chalker said. “I’ve
counted more than fifty and I haven’t gotten started good. Count on near two hundred of them down there.”

  Sandry nodded. The birds were running in and among the ruined buildings, along the crudely built wall that held them out of the city, wandering in flocks of twenty or more.

  Maydreo brought his chariot alongside Sandry’s. “Tep’s pizzle! That’s a lot of birds!”

  “Astute of you to notice, Younglord Maydreo,” Sandry said.

  “What do they eat?” Whane asked, as much to himself as anyone else. “What keeps them there? There can’t be enough around here to feed that many.”

  “Reckon they get fed,” Chalker said. He pointed.

  Four birds were coming from the north down the stream. Two of them carried deer carcasses drooping from their huge beaks. The other two carried something large and unrecognizable between them.

  “Never saw any bird do that!” Maydreo said.

  “Crows can cooperate,” Whane said. “Sometimes. And birds feed their young—”

  “They’ve seen us,” Sandry said quietly. He pointed. Four of the birds had stopped their aimless roving and were staring in their direction. Two more were running toward them. “Maydreo, go alert Peacevoice Fullerman, and get all the chariots ready for battle. I don’t think we have very long. I want all the wagons over the top of the hill. Make them come uphill to get us. Get moving, Younglord Maydreo, and maybe we’ll live until dark…”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Battle of

  Crescent City

  “I think they’re organizing,” Clever Squirrel said. She stood next to Sandry’s chariot and watched the birds below. Four of them had approached to within fifty yards of them, then dashed away again. Now the birds were milling about down in the valley.

  “They know we’re here,” Sandry said. “How smart are they?”

  Squirrel shook her head. “I can sense…well, him.”

  Suddenly curious, Sandry asked, “Could the terror bird god be female?”

  “A hen? A god making war usually goes with the top male—the rooster, the bull…In Rynildissen, the god of bees goes with the queen, they say.”

  “If they all come at once, we’ve had it,” Sandry said. “We don’t have enough troops to fight all of them at once. And if we circle the wagons, they can starve us to death right in sight of the city.”

  Squirrel nodded. “It looks like the city is safe enough if we can get into it,” she said. “That’s the gate there, and the people sure see us up here. Maybe if we run for it, they’ll let us in.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Sandry said. “Open that gate without a proper shield wall, and you might as well not have a gate. And I don’t see any shields down there at all. Spears, swords…”

  “All bright and shiny too,” Chalker said.

  “Bronze,” Sandry said.

  “Expensive,” Whane said.

  Sandry nodded, thinking, Now what? We need to get inside that city. To do that we have to make it safe for them to open the gates, safe enough that they know they’re safe. Which means we have to kill a lot of birds.

  So how do we do that? Two hundred birds. He turned to Clever Squirrel. “Can you do anything with magic? What about that thing we found at the hilltop?”

  “It’s calling the birds,” she said positively. “It would have called them down on us. I’m pretty sure that if you open that pot, they’ll come to it.”

  “Fire,” Sandry said. “Can you make fire? Quickly?”

  “There has to be something to burn,” Squirrel said. “Wizards can make fire out of nothing, but I never learned how, and besides, well—”

  “Besides, there isn’t enough manna,” Sandry said. “I know.” Never enough troops. Never enough provisions. Right.

  “There’s some,” Squirrel said. “And I can draw on that love charm they gave Tower, if she’ll let me.”

  “Enough to burn up those birds?” Sandry asked.

  “No. But I can make fires if you have firewood.”

  “Sagebrush? Logs, what’s left of those houses outside the wall?”

  “Sure, I can make those burn.”

  “I’m getting an idea.” Sandry looked up at the sun. “Four hours of light. It will take us an hour to get down there. That leaves three hours to kill all those birds.”

  “You are joking,” Green Stone said.

  “I hope not,” Burning Tower said. “You don’t make that kind of joke, do you, Sandry?” She looked at him with wonder in her eyes. Wonder and hope and faith.

  “I’m not joking, I just don’t know if I can do it. Green Stone, we need to talk. I hate complicated plans. I’m really going to hate this one, but I don’t know anything else to do. First thing we have to see is what happens if we move closer to them….”

  They moved cautiously down the hill. Some of the birds stood watching the wagon train, but the others continued to move around outside the city wall.

  “Control,” Clever Squirrel said. “The god is waiting to see what you’ll do. I can’t read its mind, Sandry—I wish I could—but I think he’s a little afraid of you.”

  “Of me?”

  “Well, of us. He’s got to know that we’re the ones who’ve been killing birds from here to Tep’s Town to Road’s End. He won’t know quite how we do that. Maybe we have big magic. Maybe we have a god on our side.”

  “Do we?”

  She shook her head. “Coyote’s nowhere. I felt him watching while we were on that hilltop, but he didn’t tell me anything. I think he knows what’s happening here, but if he wants to help us, he sure hasn’t given me any sign. But the bird god might not know that.”

  “Would birds be afraid of Coyote?”

  She shrugged. “These are big birds. Coyote’s a long way off, and there’s not much manna around here.”

  “So he can’t control the birds very well?”

  “Not one at a time. He could tell them all to charge, though. Send them into a frenzy. They’d follow the top rooster. Sandry, the easiest magic makes things do what they want to do already. These birds are hungry and they want to kill us and eat us, and eat the horses, and eat the bison, and eat anything they can tear apart.”

  “Does it take magic to keep them from attacking us?”

  “The closest ones,” Squirrel said. “They want to attack. Others want to go hunting. They’re not doing that.”

  Sandry nodded. “Then this just might work. Here we go. Chalker, have the trumpeter sound engage.”

  “Yes, sir.” Chalker signaled. Notes sang out in the warm afternoon.

  Maydreo and the other chariots charged toward the birds. As they came closer, they wheeled. Spearmen threw, and the chariots raced away from the road, across the open fields.

  “First test passed,” Sandry said. “They’re following.”

  Each chariot was followed by a group of birds. For the moment, the way down to the abandoned hogans was clear. “Green Stone! Now!” Sandry shouted.

  “Heeyah!” Green Stone urged the bison forward. At their fastest, they were slower than a man can run, far slower than the birds. Sandry rode ahead, ready to attack any birds that hadn’t followed the charioteers. So far the way was clear.

  As the wagons reached the gaps between the ruined hogans, the wagoneers urged their bison through, so that the wagons plugged the gaps. These hogans had been built in nearly converging parallel lines with a street between them. With the wagons filling the gaps between the abandoned houses, the street became an extended wagon camp, irregularly shaped but sturdy.

  “This wouldn’t work against an army,” Sandry said. “But maybe with birds. And if we’re fast enough before the horses tire.”

  “It’ll work.”

  Chalker sounds confident, Sandry thought. I wish I were that confident. And Burning Tower was looking at him with no doubt in her eyes at all. He grinned at her and got a flashing smile in return. She should be scared, he thought. We’re all depending on her. But she thinks it will work, because I told her it would.
/>   His heart pounded. And if I’m wrong? She’ll be dead. We’ll all be dead.

  Thin notes sounded from far away—Maydreo, signaling that all was well. But the horses would be tiring now.

  “Ready!” Green Stone shouted.

  Sandry nodded to Chalker. More trumpet notes sounded, signals to the charioteers, and to Burning Tower.

  Burning Tower sat astride Spike and whispered to the one-horn as the trumpet notes sang in the afternoon. “We can do it,” she whispered. “We can.” She clutched the cookpot against her chest.

  The one-horn nickered and tried to turn around to lick her hand. The monster birds made him nervous, and that showed. Around her, the wagoneers worked frantically to fill in the gaps between the houses, unhitch the bison, and get them clear. And now it was too late—it had to work.

  Of course it will work, she told herself. Sandry knows what he’s doing! She looked around for him, but he was busy giving signals.

  New trumpet notes from both sides. The charioteers were coming. Burning Tower touched Spike’s ear. “It’s time,” she whispered. “Let’s go!”

  At a gallop. To the right, there was Maydreo, followed by the birds. The chariot horses were lathered, straining to stay ahead of the birds. Tower urged Spike ahead, toward the oncoming chariots; now, turn, run behind the chariots, between the chariots and the birds. She shouted, “Run, Spike,” and looked back. Most were following her. Most but not all. Was it time?

  She slacked the loop of rope that bound the iron pot. She lifted the lid for a long moment, then slapped it down again. She whiffed rotting meat: they’d never had the chance to clean the cookpot. Have to boil it out later.

  But the nightmare birds were following her. She led the train of birds across, toward the other chariots, around, opened the pot, averting her eyes from the glow, slapped the lid down. Now for the next, riding at a gallop; no time to be afraid. “What am I doing?” she shouted, and laughed, then galloped toward another group of birds, the pot held ready….