Dawn of Wonder (The Wakening Book 1)

by Jonathan Renshaw

  But even if he had been draped over cushions, sleep would have eluded him. What had been discovered in the Gellerac archives? – whatever those were. What was this possible threat that was more worrying than open war? His frustrated curiosity added as much to his discomfort as the physical aches.

  Heavy boots tramped along the passage the next morning and stopped outside his cell.

  “Out with you!” the guard said as he swung the gate open.

  Aedan slowly extended his legs against the cramps. It was taking too long. The guard grabbed one of his ankles and dragged him out.

  “On your feet! Time for your hearing.”

  Uncoiling and stretching out was a slow process. The guard was stamping with impatience by the time Aedan was able to stand and shuffle along behind him. They took a few turns and entered a small, bare room where two men waited – Dun and Wildemar. The guard left and closed the door.

  “What have you to say for yourself?” Dun asked, rising to his feet and filling the room with his annoyance.

  “I’m sorry,” Aedan stammered. “There was nobody in the buildings. I was afraid something terrible had happened –”

  “Yes, yes, we know that,” Wildemar interrupted. His squirrelly eyes snapped at Aedan and then darted around the room while busy fingers worked as they always did when he spoke. He swung back to Aedan and the words began to tumble out like discarded acorn shells. “We would have done the same thing in your place. We are more disappointed with the others for sleeping in. The rule is a silly tradition made by tame men in puffy robes who wouldn’t be able to find east an hour after sunrise. Your punishment is over. The thing that bothers us is how it escaped your notice that you were being tailed. You have some remarkable abilities, and it is frankly disappointing to see that you were so easily followed. What can you say to that?”

  Aedan was trying to stir his mind but it resisted his efforts like porridge gone cold. He had not been able to follow the speed of Wildemar’s tirade, but the part about being easily followed had stuck. “I was concentrating on hiding from the guards ahead of me,” he said.

  “And you didn’t look behind you once!”

  “No, I suppose I didn’t.”

  Wildemar’s head twitched with feral vigour and he muttered something potent under his breath, clearly disgusted.

  Dun was grinning. “Will you make that mistake again?”

  “No. Never.” Aedan spoke on behalf of every ache that racked his body.

  “Good. Then I think this has been a worthwhile experience. As to the matter of what you overheard – the birds were making such a racket in the tree that you were barely able to determine the language being spoken, let alone the words. If we hear otherwise, you will be moving back into your little cell for a very long time. Understood?”

  Aedan burned to ask about the archives, but the look in Dun’s eye was not one to be trifled with. “Yes, sir,” he said, dousing his curiosity and almost choking in the steam of internal protest.

  “You had better get to the kitchen and put some food in you. I want you down in the training hall by the time we begin. Run!”

  The session was undiluted suffering. Aedan stumbled through the exercises, accumulating a wide selection of bruises and giving none. He fell off every obstacle and collapsed under every load. The classes were worse. The wooden chairs were featherbeds and the lessons lullabies. His name was spoken in sharp tones by every subject master.

  Liru looked worried when she saw him – the story had obviously spread the day before. Mistress Gilda was still in a dangerous mood after her encounter with Peashot’s snake, so Liru kept pinching Aedan when she noticed him drifting off. During a lull in the class, she turned to Aedan.

  “You know what’s happening?” she whispered. “All the disturbance – you managed to overhear?”

  “I was told that I only heard birds chirping and couldn’t understand a thing that was said.”

  She looked at him with a frown that receded as she caught his meaning. “It is a great pity then that you have not yet been taught to speak bird,” she said, and dropped the topic.

  For the rest of the week, furious whispering ran like an infection through the academy. Everybody knew something – drought, flood, plague, war, wild beasts and increased taxes – but it soon became clear that nobody knew anything.

  At the end of the week, when it seemed they could take no more, the marshals’ quadrant was informed. Dun addressed the first-year boys in the dining hall and explained the situation of the border threats.

  “Diplomacy, it appears, has failed us. Prince Burkhart has been in consultation with the generals and senior marshals this past week and issued a series of steps we will be taking to fortify our defences. It has been deemed a good exercise that all apprentices should contribute to the proposed designs and strategies. As a result, the next few weeks will see you spending far longer with Master Skeet. Other classes will be reduced.”

  Dun left the hall, saying nothing about the rangers, the storm, or the Gellerac history and what it implied. Aedan clenched his teeth in frustration.

  Glancing across the room, he noticed Malik and Cayde smiling at him as though he were the punch-line of some joke. He had seen it constantly through the week. They had been smearing him with every drop of humiliation they could squeeze from his stint in the rat cell. Between them, they had spread the word as far as they could, making him seem ridiculous to anyone who would listen – which was almost everyone Aedan knew.

  He had tried to ignore it, but the lingering exhaustion was making him snappish. Dropping his spoon, he straightened up and glared. They threw their heads back and laughed, along with several boys at their table.

  Malik stood, pulled the hair back on the side of his head and held his ear out as if listening for something, then he folded the ear down on itself, mimicking Aedan’s, and pulled a face of mock misery as if the half ear had made him deaf. The boys around him shouted with merriment.

  Aedan’s temper flared. He grabbed his bowl and took aim at Malik’s head. Just as he was about to release it, he felt a strong hand grip his wrist. He spun around and scowled at Hadley.

  “You won’t win like that Aedan. Remember what Dun taught us – fear and rage can both make a man stupid. Malik wants you to –”

  The sound of jeering laughter grew and it pushed Aedan over the edge. He broke free of Hadley’s arm and flung the bowl with all his might. It only brushed Malik’s head, but sprayed several boys with porridge, reaping a storm of angry protests and three strokes of the cane, which did a lot better than brush him.

  That night, after Dun had called an end to the study session, Aedan was easing himself into bed when Hadley walked over.

  “You are playing his game Aedan,” he said. “And you are going to lose.”

  “Shut up,” Aedan said. He had no desire to be counselled or comforted. He just wanted to be left alone. Where was the value in misery when nobody would respect it? He wanted them to recognise the consuming bitterness of his young life, not festoon him with a string of cheap suggestions for brightening the scene.

  “Don’t be a cur. Just hear what I have to say.” Hadley was never easily put out.

  Aedan made no response, so Hadley continued.

  “Malik is going to carry on doing everything he can to make you hate yourself and this place. It’s really obvious that he wants you out, and at this rate he is going to succeed.”

  “Are you trying to help him?” Aedan asked, annoyed.

  “No. I’m trying to help you, and you would see that if you just let me speak.”

  Aedan grunted.

  “My suggestion is that you start thinking. When you lose your temper – which you certainly know how to do – you lose your head as well. You have to find his weaknesses if you want to take him on, instead of just steaming up and exploding.”

  “What weaknesses has he got?”

  “The way he hates you. He would risk a lot to see you leave. ‘Over-eager opponents always
over-extend.’ Don’t you remember?”

  Long after Hadley had retired, Aedan stared into the darkness, considering his friend’s advice. Something did need to change. He was being baited like a dumb carp and beached every time he bit. Yet when he considered putting some vengeful plan into action, he felt no enthusiasm. He wanted to live for bigger things than that. More importantly, he did not want a war here, did not need an enduring enemy among his companions.

  He had known enough enemies in his life.

  If he succeeded in humiliating Malik, things would only step up a notch. He’d seen that happen with Emroy.

  And Malik was too cunning. He was never caught. The taunts were always too small to be considered a problem by any of the masters, but his own reactions were explosions. They would not go unpunished.

  That was when he began to understand. Malik’s cunning was not the problem; it was his own stupidity. He was taking the bait while it was still insignificant. But if he ignored it, the bait would have to be increased in size, perhaps enough to draw a master’s attention …

  Yes, Aedan thought. That might work. Why get into a tangle with a tomcat if there is a dog nearby?

  When news of the border threat spilled across the other quadrants, the whole academy was set abuzz. Students skipped classes, ignored assignments, and gathered in clusters that hummed with a mixture of fear and excitement. Strict discipline was applied to restore a semblance of order, but the thrill of far-off danger had taken root.

  The first-year marshal apprentices had spent three weeks under a shower of information on defence and one week attempting to apply it. Building for defence was far more involved than they had expected. The detail was staggering – down to things like unsmoothed outer stone being preferable to smooth, because, for some reason that none of them had understood, it suffered less when being punished by catapults. They had submitted their first proposals for Castath’s defence and were awaiting Skeet’s feedback. The master marched into the class, slammed his books down on the desk and snatched up a page of notes.

  “Group one,” he barked, “you killed our whole city within a week because you walled us in from all water. Group two, most of us die outside the city because your barbican is so intricate and awkward that the crush of people and livestock creates a killing ground for more than half the population as they try to enter their own refuge. Group three, your huge unmanned outer wall provides the enemy with complete protection from the catapults on your inner wall. Group four, I told you that the maximum amount of sandstone that could be mined, shaped and placed in five years was no more than a million tons. Granite gives you less than a quarter of that because mining and working it is so much slower. Even if I were to replace your granite with sandstone, you have designed a system of defences that would take two hundred years to construct.”

  Skeet dropped his page on the desk and glared. “Think boys, think. You need to consider the whole population and all its demands, its resources and limitations. Then you need to become the enemy and work out any possible way to get past your own walls, and re-design accordingly.

  “The greatest minds in Castath are working on this now. Try to consider what they may have overlooked. It would not be the first time a young mind has seen what an older one has not.”

  The boys shuffled into their groups to lick their wounds and mend their plans.

  “I told you the outer wall was going to be a problem with the catapults if it’s that far away,” Aedan said to the four from his dorm. “Let’s start again.”

  Hadley made the first suggestion. “I say we dig a well this time. If we don’t try to stretch the outer wall down to the river we can broaden it and give it an allure.”

  “I thought walls were meant to repel,” said Peashot.

  “It means a walkway on top. How did you manage to doze in that class? Skeet was at his most dangerous.”

  “Commitment.”

  “If we are going to make the walls broader,” said Lorrimer, “I want a talus – that’s the lower part of the wall that slopes outwards, Peashot. Makes walls harder to dismantle, upsets siege weapons and deflects whatever we drop – shoots it out into the enemy.”

  The small boy might have reacted to Lorrimer’s tone, but there was an inwardness about his eyes that suggested he had just learned something.

  “Here’s an idea,” said Aedan. “How about a moat on the inside? It would encourage the Fenn soldiers to spend weeks tunnelling only to get flooded at the end of their efforts. We could also use it to water livestock grazing between the walls. It would be like a long dam. Could put some fish in there too. Might be useful in a siege.”

  The others nodded.

  “Sorry Peashot,” Lorrimer said with a smirk, “Livestock are the –”

  “Oh, go shove a gizzard down your throat!”

  The others grinned.

  “An internal moat sounds good,” said Hadley, “though I’m not sure if keeping it a secret is practical.”

  “Even if they have spies to tell them, it would keep them from tunnelling,” said Aedan.

  “Tunnelling all the way through to our side yes, but sappers only need to get the tunnel under the wall before they fire their supporting timbers and collapse everything, wall included.”

  “Alright, so it won’t stop sappers, but neither will an external moat, at least not for long – they would just fill in the section where they need to work. No! Wait. We can stop sappers. Wherever we see them digging, we could wall off and dry out a section of our internal moat, then dig a few tunnels of our own under the walls – and we could start right at the walls, not way back like they would have to. We could listen for where they are working, dig into their tunnel, release our moat and flood them before they can set anything alight. Flooded tunnels would be useless if we kept them flooded. Then we push loads of sand and cement into the tunnels to make them solid again.”

  “Might be difficult to intercept,” Hadley mused. “How would you know which way to go when you’re digging.”

  “I’ve seen lots of animals pinpoint burrowing prey. Maybe we could train dogs or badgers or something to point our men in the right direction.”

  “Interesting idea,” said Vayle.

  Everyone nodded.

  “Something else that might help with this,” said Vayle, “is some tensile strength to the wall’s rubble core. Remember what Skeet taught us about the mortar we use – that it’s only strong with compression. That’s why the wall collapses when a big cavity is made underneath. It gets pulled apart, not pushed together. But what if we could combine stone and large tree trunks placed inside the wall? Enough wood might be able to hold the stones up over a cavity.”

  “Wood rots,” said Lorrimer.

  “It would be strong well beyond our lifetime. It’s the most practical option. Any kind of metal would set the weapons production back. I think layered tree trunks, perhaps with all their branches, would provide decades of strength. Over time, walls could be rebuilt.”

  Nobody was entirely comfortable with the idea of whole trees decaying inside their precious wall, but they could not fault Vayle’s reasoning, so it was added.

  “If we have more stone to work with,” said Lorrimer, “I’m for flanking towers with curtain walls.”

  “Round towers,” Hadley added. “They might take longer to build, but if we are going to put the moat on the inside, we’ll need to strengthen the wall, and round towers are harder to undermine.”

  “How about overhanging turrets then?” Vayle said. “They use less stone. We could use the extra to thicken the wall or the talus.”

  Hadley scratched out and scribbled as the ideas flowed.

  “One central watch tower,” said Lorrimer. “High, very high, say two hundred or three hundred feet. And small watchtowers with fire beacons on the six visible hills.”

  “Instead of wasting all that stone on such a high tower,” said Peashot, “why don’t we just stand you on top of the keep? But what’s the point, anyway, of ma
king it so high if we have towers on the hills?”

  “Those watch towers can be ambushed. And if there’s low cloud, we might not be able to see them.”

  “But then your high tower will also be useless if it’s got its head lost in the clouds.”

  “Fine, then let’s have a few circular platforms lower down on the tower so it is both a high and a low … what do you call a place where you look for stuff?”

  “Vantage point,” said Vayle.

  Hadley added the note.

  “How about we move our catapults to the outer wall?” Lorrimer said, leaning forward and looking like he was really starting to enjoy himself. “Can’t see why we didn’t do that last time.”

  “We didn’t do it last time,” said Vayle, “because our wall was too thin to be manned. It’s also a bad idea to put catapults on a wall that isn’t strong and heavily defended, because if the enemy takes the wall, they just turn the catapults around and we get attacked with our own weapons.”

  “Oh. Didn’t think of that.”

  “We can do it now though,” said Aedan, “seeing as we’ve used the extra stone to thicken it. Let’s also create a slow zone over the approaching ground. The land around the walls is very flat, but it could be spoiled with mounds, ditches, and stakes pointing away from the city. It would be impossible to run across a field like that without stumbling and getting impaled. And it would slow the approach of assault towers. The slower their approach, the more time they give us to bombard them.”