Two soldiers went to the rear of the machine where, set on the frame, was a windlass with a four-spoked handle on either side of the drum.
They set to work. One whole section of the machine, the part corresponding to the man’s head and body, tilted farther backwards and, when they had finished turning, came to rest in a nearly horizontal position, the basket-seat almost touching the drum of the windlass, which the soldiers locked in place.
The bundles between flanks and knees were not ropes at all. They were tendons, now stretched almost to breaking point by this act of turning which had reminded Tagart of drawing back an immense bow.
“It’s a weapon!” Correy shouted.
“To your stations!”
Four more soldiers were approaching, carrying a man’s body slung between them. They lifted it on the seat; a block of wood was inserted between the windlass and the frame, held there by the tension on the rope.
The corpse was that of an unusually large and heavy man. It hung there limply, head lolling back, arms loose, legs splayed. The darkness at the pubis formed an odd pattern and, even at this distance, Tagart could see that the corpse had been emasculated. He felt a foreboding of recognition. The chin was raised; the face was at angle and could not be clearly seen, but he knew then that it would be scarred and misshapen, the left ear missing, the hair and beard tufted and sparse.
The Flint Lord came out of his tent, his breath like smoke. He was wearing the same immaculate cape, the same gauntlets and boots. He strolled to the machine. A soldier in dark grey took up an axe and went to stand by the windlass.
Next to the Flint Lord was another man in a fur cape. Tagart saw him raise a shouting-cone to his lips and, in crisply enunciated words that penetrated the walls of the Trundle and reached the ears of those within, he delivered the message that was the prelude to the end.
“Slaves! Savages! We send you your saviour!”
Rising smoothly to his toes, the soldier with the axe paused at the height of his swing to confirm his aim, then brought the blade down on the block.
The flint edge cut the rope. The tendons, released from their torment, contracted so quickly that the uprights could not be seen in the moment before they slammed against the crossbar. The basket’s load was ejected with a bang. It sailed upwards and towards the fort, a man’s mutilated body, turning, arms and legs flung wide. Tagart watched it clear the spikes on the gatehouse roof and saw it crumple against the ground, thirty yards inside the enclosure.
This too was a dream. It could not be true.
But the visage of the corpse, twisted by chance towards him, wore a death-grin that was too real for any dream.
And now, as he lay in the enclosure, there was no reassuring white light to consume the horror of Bubeck’s death. This flesh, propelled over the battlements in grisly and symbolic prophecy, this was how the Flint Ford dealt with a man who had been revered, a chief, the choice of the Sun; and by this act he had announced the same fate for Tagart and all those with him in the fort.
4
The second projectile followed in a few minutes, once the cut end of the rope had been refastened and the drum rewound. This time the load was the body of a living man, who survived just long enough after impact to gasp some unintelligible phrases. Four more living men followed one another, lobbed by the machine in paths of varying accuracy. One fell short; one struck the palisade and tumbled back into the ditch; two found their way over the battlements.
Then, after a delay, corpses, both of men and women, the naked bodies of those slaves and nomads who had died on Levin Down, were hurled into the enclosure.
There was pandemonium. As each new body landed there were fresh cries from the slaves and many of the nomads, who had deserted their posts and wanted to risk their chances on the hill. However, as soon as Bubeck’s body had been thrown over, a large contingent of soldiers had taken up a position on the north-east side of the fort, commanding the other gates.
Despite their presence, a mob of slaves tried to open these gates anyway, and were only dissuaded by the rest with the use of force. And unknown to Tagart, a party of seven slaves on the eastern battlements found some rope and lowered themselves to the ground. They were seen, chased by three teams of soldiers, and clubbed among the thorn scrub. Then their bodies were added to the pile waiting to be loaded on the machine.
Besides the hostages and the hundred wounded in the barracks, there were just under three hundred people inside the fort. Over half were nomads; those from the Water Spirit were the most loyal to Tagart, who was doing everything possible to bring the slaves back under control.
They were going wild. Word had spread that spells had been cast on the bodies, that they were diseased. Such was the fury to get out that a prolonged struggle took place at the south-west gates, opposite the Flint Lord’s main position. The buttresses were thrown aside; the slaves clambered into the gatehouse and raised the locking-grid. They were fighting to open the gates themselves when it was realized that, for some time past, the bombardment had ceased.
Someone called out from a guard-tower. The machine had broken down.
* * *
“How long will it take to repair?” Hewzane said with acerbity. The whole effect of the bombardment, which had been his idea, was threatened by the incompetence of Blean and his gang of bunglers.
Blean was working with his men. He did not trouble to answer.
“Answer me or Lord Brennis,” Hewzane said. “How long will it take?”
“Not long.”
Blean jumped down from the vurfer. One of the six great bundles of tendons had snapped near its point of insertion in the fixed part of the frame. As Hewzane watched, Blean’s men continued to strip the broken bundle and prepare another.
“It’s the cold,” Blean said, pulling on his gloves. “We did our best to keep the tendons warm.”
The design was Blean’s: he had based it on those he had seen in the homelands, siege-engines for flinging rocks and fireballs. But here, Hewzane had no wish to do needless damage to the fort, and so he had hit upon a novel way of achieving his ends. Gehan had readily consented, leaving Blean and Hewzane to work out the details.
From the five prisoners who had talked, Hewzane had ascertained that the savages in the fort were relying on the chieftain, the sixth prisoner, to save them. This man had been apprehended, partly by shrewdness, mainly by luck, in the thick of the fighting on Levin Down. He had expired under interrogation. After his body had been suitably prepared and thrown over the palisade, he had been followed to the vurfer by the other prisoners whom, as punishment for their loquacity, Hewzane had left alive.
During the night, teams of soldiers had brought the corpses from Levin Down. Other teams had been sent to local villages to procure, among other things, a supply of long tendons.
The vurfer’s propulsive force, Hewzane admitted, had been estimated with commendable skill, but Blean’s performance had otherwise left much to be desired. His shooting had been deplorable. To panic the slaves still more, Hewzane had wanted all the bodies landed in the same spot, on the roof of the little altar-house where the Trundle slaves were allowed to hold their services. Nonetheless, the exercise had almost succeeded, as shown by the attempted escape of a few defenders from the eastern battlements, when, infuriatingly, this interruption had come.
“You’ll answer for this, Blean,” Hewzane said, and returned to the shelter, where he had left Gehan sitting at Ika’s bedside.
They both turned towards him as he entered, Ika with the uncertain expression and raised face of the newly blind, Gehan with an almost furtive look that Hewzane had never seen before.
“Well, Hewzane?” Gehan said, naming him for Ika’s benefit. He rose to his feet. “Well? What was it? What made them stop?”
Hewzane explained.
If not quite pleasing to Gehan, the news did not upset him greatly. It seemed instead to confirm him in some other course which he had been eagerly considering.
“
Come with me,” he said, taking Hewzane’s elbow. Once outside, he began talking rapidly. He expressed the view that the bombardment could no longer succeed. Now that it had been interrupted, he felt, the savages would be able to recover their morale. The cumulative effect had been lost. Other tactics would be needed to get them out of the fort and avoid the deadlock of siege. He suggested calling to their leader, Shode. The soldiers would offer to withdraw, and would indeed do so, allowing the defenders their freedom. Having left the Trundle, hindered by their wounded, they would of course be pursued and overtaken. Those who were able-bodied would be captured and returned to the slaves’ quarters; the rest would be dispatched as worthless.
The idea, although dishonourable – in that it recognized the savages as equals who could be petitioned – was interesting, but behind Gehan’s words Hewzane sensed something more. It was as though his concern for the fort had been subordinated to an ulterior purpose. And so it proved.
“I want the man who blinded my sister,” Gehan went on. “A slave. She doesn’t know his name, but he was a pedlar, taken in the Village just after Goele. Rald knows his face. If they give up the man, we’ll say the rest can go free.”
Hewzane was nonplussed. The implacable will that Gehan had displayed only the previous evening, the ability to keep his emotions in check, had, it seemed, been dealt a decisive final blow by the incident of the toster. During the night, Hewzane had watched his grasp on reality weakening still further. Over the past months he had become increasingly irrational. He had been subject to violent fluctuations in mood. His attention to detail had at times become obsessive; at other times he had maintained a lofty indifference to particulars, leaving his officers to arrange everything, careless of the extravagant cost of importing mercenaries from the Home Lord’s army.
The signs had been there, long before the campaign, even long before Hewzane’s commission, and they had been observed not only by Hewzane, but by those abroad who were students of the island country, students who viewed with disfavour the independent turn taken by Brennis Fourth. Then there was the question of Ika, the unhealthy rumours that had been circulating. Since her arrival, Gehan’s sanity had been eroding ever more quickly, and now, perhaps, with the events of the preceding day, he had come to the very borders of madness.
“See to it then, Hewzane.”
“Very good, my lord.” He signalled to a man nearby. “You! Fetch me the shouting-cone!”
* * *
Lady Brennis shuddered and tried to avert her face.
“Tell me!” Tagart said, and turned her chin so that her eyes were looking into his own. Her whole body was trembling; her composure had crumbled at last, unable to withstand this latest blow.
“Yes!” she cried. “They slept together. He’s in love with her and he’s insane!”
They were upstairs in the bedchamber where Lady Brennis and Rian, her body-slave, had been confined. Tagart had run to the residence from the crowd in the outer enclosure. Although no one there knew anything about the Flint Lord’s sister, Klay had been recognized from the General’s description as the man the Flint Lord wanted. But Klay was dead; and no answer had yet been given.
Tagart went downstairs and started across the enclosure. Since the first hours of the siege, since fearing that Bubeck might not come, his mind had been almost permanently engaged in trying to solve the intractable problem which had its roots in a single fact: by shutting the gates, the nomads had cut themselves off from the outside world. The soldiers were free to draw on the resources of the countryside around them; they could change their position as they wished: they had no fixed or vulnerable point. In order to get at and kill the Flint Lord, these circumstances would have to change.
Tired and dispirited, he had tried again and again to arrive at a plan that might work, and every time he had failed. But he had never given up a glimmer of hope that Bubeck might come after all, and so the bleakness and finality of his failure had not confronted him in all its force. Only when he had seen Bubeck’s body had he been compelled to accept the truth. It had shaken him and left him unable to think.
Tagart climbed into the gatehouse and took up the paper cone. The General was still standing by the machine, awaiting a reply.
This was the nomads’ first and, perhaps, only chance. If Tagart wasted it, if the siege were allowed to develop to its inescapable conclusion, he knew that he and he alone would carry the blame: he alone would have committed his nation to oblivion. It had given him its best warriors, the young men and women, and he had brought about their downfall. Half were already dead, heaped there in the enclosure or by the Flint Lord’s machine. Those who had not joined the fight, those who had stayed behind in the winter camps, were the dependants, the children who could not look after themselves, and the old people who would be unable to breed a generation to replace the one he had destroyed. Unaided, they would linger for a time, like the prisoners in the fort, besieged by the forest, and one by one they would die. And although some of the children might survive, there would not be enough of them to maintain the old ways, and they too would eventually disappear.
Their future rested with him. If he ruined this chance, as he had ruined everything till now, it would be the end.
In all his life Tagart had never before recognized defeat. The elders had taught him their version of courage, a blend of tenacity and honour. He saw now that they knew nothing. They were innocents, like himself. The scale of their code was dwarfed by what was happening here; the Flint Lord was not an enemy that they would understand. He was a colossus, beyond evil, beyond humanity, beyond even the brain and body of one man. Somehow, among the villages and their fields, a monster had been spawned that might never be stopped.
His men served him, not for love, not for the respect that was all the reward the hunters ever craved, but for payment. If he was challenged by a man who could pay more, they would transfer their allegiance without a qualm; and, if that new master fell sick and died, they would go to whoever could pay them, and spit on his memory. These were the men who had built the machine, who were fitting new tendons, and one of them, their general, was standing there and waiting for an answer.
Tagart raised the cone. “General! General! It is Shode!”
“Do you have the culprit?”
“We do!”
* * *
“If I do as you suggest,” Gehan said, “there will be three of them, counting the prisoner, and only two of us.”
Shode, the savages’ leader, was insisting on several conditions before giving up the guilty man. He had asked for the soldiers by the north-east gates to be recalled to the main company, and this had been done. He had then stipulated that the man was to be received by Gehan himself, alone and unarmed. He would be brought by Shode in person, also unarmed.
Gehan had refused this condition; it could have no object but to expose himself to attack. He had consulted Hewzane and Speich, the Vuchten commander. Hewzane had suggested a compromise: that each principal should be accompanied by a deputy. Gehan’s would be Speich, an expert in close combat.
They were standing at the edge of the camp, the vurfer behind them; Blean had finished the repairs.
Impatient as Gehan was to apprehend the man who had blinded Ika, he had yet to lose either his caution or his common sense, and he found Hewzane’s attitude quite inexplicable. They were very much in control: he saw no reason to yield to the savages’ demands.
“But, my lord,” Hewzane said. “If we refuse them this, they will not give up the man and your strategy will fail.”
Gehan studied him, and Speich. It was almost as if they wanted him to put his life at risk.
“Your argument is absurd,” he said. “Tell them to send the man at once or the offer is forfeit.”
* * *
Gehan could see faces at the battlements, in the gatehouse, and someone was in the nearest guard-tower, leaning on the parapet and looking down.
They had all been watching. Two of the savages had low
ered a rope ladder and brought the guilty man across the snow, leaving him at a point that was out of range of Gehan’s and their own archers. Two soldiers had then gone to collect him.
Gehan would give them no mercy. Their presence on the battlements and in the fort itself affronted him beyond measure. The Trundle was his inner house, and they had befouled it. This alone was crime enough; but it shrank to nothing beside what had been done to Ika. And now this. A corpse.
“He is the man,” Rald said.
Gehan tried to calm himself. “Hewzane,” he said. “We have wasted enough time on these vermin.”
“I agree, my lord. We’ll withdraw at once and allow them to escape.”
“No!”
“They have kept their part of it, my lord. We can pretend to do the same.”
“Their chief has shown himself a liar. He cannot be trusted. They will leave the fort on my terms, not his.”
“But —”
“Blean. Can you make fireballs?”
“We have enough netting,” Blean said. “And some straw.”
“Lamp fat?”
“Pig fat. We got it from the villages last night.”
“Send for boulders. We’ll burn down the gates.”
“Yes, my lord,” Blean said, and made as if to leave.
“One moment.” Gehan gestured at the body of the pedlar. “This is to be our first fireball.”
Gehan went to Ika’s shelter and let the entrance flap fall behind him. She turned her face; he crossed to the bed, sat down, and reassured her with a touch of his hand. She put her own hand on his and held it to her breast.
“Stay with me.”
“Just for a little.”
“Have you got him?”
“He’s dead. Listen to me, Ika. We’re going to take the fort back now. It may not be safe here. I want you to take Hewzane’s dog-sledge and go with Rald to Eartham. Just for a while.”
The Flint Lord Page 19