The woman hugged her arms round herself, looking troubled for the first time. ‘It’s started,’ she said. ‘The battle’s started.’
Cwen had drifted into half-sleep tangled between Wine and Wingard when the alarm rang. She had a moment of confusion and then one of fear: the reactions of childhood, when everyone knew the bells meant an attack, warriors of the tribes come to steal them away. And then she scrambled upright and knew: an attack had come, but it was no longer her place to cower while others did the fighting.
Hawks learned how to wake fast and fight soon. She buckled on her knife and quiver, took her bow and spears and was out of her tent with the twins beside her while the echoes of the first peal were still sounding.
‘To me!’ she shouted and the two score of her clutch gathered around her in a fighting order they’d had years to learn. She looked them over: weapons ready, grins or grimaces or stern blank faces, however each of them looked when battle was near. They stank of unwashed bodies and leather armour worn constantly over many days of waiting for this moment. Nearby, every clutch she’d ordered to camp by the entrance to the deep paths was forming up with the same haste.
The sun was almost overhead, a good sign. It warmed her as she ran towards the battle and she wondered why the Brotherband had chosen to attack now. They’d been underground for weeks; perhaps the passing of the days had lost all meaning to them.
The gateway loomed ahead of her. Ivy had climbed it and crystals in the stone arch twinkled in the sunlight. For a moment her eyes misunderstood the scale, so that the gate seemed the size of a normal door and the warriors emerging from it only toys. Then her perspective shifted and she saw it for what it was: an opening a hundred feet tall and fifty broad and a river of men, a flood of them pouring out of it.
The Brotherband wore black trousers, black shirts and silver turbans. They rushed out unopposed but fierce, men accustomed to fighting and always ready for it. She remembered what Sang Ki had told her about their massacre on the plains and thought she could see its reflection in their faces. They were men with the hearts of moon beasts.
There were already hundreds of them free of the deep way. Her stomach clenched. There were far too many, but her people were only just now mustering, the hawks and the Jorlith and the churls and thegns pressed into service. At least those few already in position had obeyed her orders and were waiting for her command. They couldn’t afford to drive the Brotherband away unbloodied, to re-emerge and fight elsewhere. The invaders had to be killed here.
The warriors had seen her people. They couldn’t have expected to encounter resistance so soon, but they screamed their rage and their defiance, and perhaps their contempt too. Cwen knew how thin her fighters were spread; she barely had two hundred here to stem this tide.
‘Drive them back!’ she shouted, and threw her long spear. It found its mark in a warrior’s chest and the force of it threw him to the ground. Before he could rise, the rest trampled over him, blood fury driving them to meet the enemy.
Two clutches of her hawks stayed back and drew their bows. The range was short and she saw Arth, the strongest of them all, loose one arrow that went right through a man clear to the fletching. The flint tip pierced the chest of the warrior close behind and he yelled and pushed it away and the dead man with it.
Then she and her own clutch charged. Two of her hawks fell, three, a half-dozen from the Brotherband’s own short bows and throwing-knives, until they met in a great clash with grunts and screams, the ground beneath them rocky with corpses.
‘Push them back!’ she yelled, but it was impossible to follow her own command. She’d never been in a fight like this. The moon beasts were huge and dangerous but the Hunt fought them one by one. Today’s battle was chaos. To her left, she saw the stern-faced Jorlith keeping a line, shoulder to shoulder with shields high and spears out. The tide of the Brotherband crashed and curled and fell back against that barrier, but the rest of her force were suffering from their lack of the same discipline.
The thegns and churls seemed to do little but die. They were armed with swords and knives and axes and cudgels, but few knew how to wield them. She saw a thegn deflect the blow of a sabre with his sword, only for the man beside him to stand aside and let a spear thrust pierce his flank. Half of them lay dead or wounded and a dozen dropped their weapons and fled the battle, chased by the screams of those they’d abandoned.
Her own hawks suffered too. They fought in clumps now, back to back. Hers was to Wine and Wingard. She heard a yell from one of the twins and knew that he’d been wounded, but he didn’t fall. She had her own wounds, but she barely felt them. Battle heated the blood so hot it burned out all other sensation.
The Brotherband warrior she faced was afire with it. She could see the lust for killing in his face as he swept his sword towards her guts. Her spear shaft deflected it, but he had the better weapon for this close-quarters fighting. His sword swung again and this time she wasn’t quite fast enough. Her spear only half-turned the blade and an inch of steel bit into her side.
The warrior grinned and swung again and this time she was even slower, receiving a deeper cut on her other flank to match the first. She was bleeding heavily now and a bleeding animal didn’t last long.
Her mind felt hazed and the haze helped. The warrior’s face blurred until it could have been a beast’s. She’d never fought men before but she’d killed a thousand monsters. His silver claw swung for her and she ducked the blow with ease. His teeth bared, he pressed forward and she saw the opening in his defences, the soft spot in the underbelly. She fought as well with left hand as with right; it was her greatest skill. Her spear in one hand, she drew her knife with the other and plunged it in, just where she’d struck Eadric and with the same effect.
Another warrior came, another beast and she pulled her blade free and turned on him. She was little more than an animal herself now, fighting with instincts that her years as a hawk had honed to a fine edge. She saw others of her clutch fall and didn’t feel it. The Brotherband were fierce and they were numerous but they couldn’t stand against her. She took a step forward, then another. Wingard and Wine moved with her, still alive. The Jorlith line pressed forward too, trampling the dead churls and thegns beneath them.
‘Cwen!’ someone shouted, Wingard or Wine at her shoulder. ‘Cwen, look!’
She took a wound to her cheek from a knife, pressed her own into a throat.
‘Cwen!’ Louder and more insistent this time. ‘Cwen, we’re far enough!’
She deflected another blow, blinked and came back to herself. The battlefield expanded from this one moment, this one enemy, to a wider thing of which she had charge. The Brotherband had been pressed back. They were bunched at the mouth of the deep way now. But so many of her own were fallen. A single line of Jorlith stood between the tribesmen and the freedom of the forest. There were more Brotherband still within the vast tunnel and they were pressing forward, trying to force the Moon Forest folk back. She had to do it now, or it would never be done.
‘Retreat!’ she yelled. She was surprised to find her voice hoarse, as if she’d been shouting for hours. She didn’t remember saying anything. ‘Retreat!’ But the rest were caught in their own battle fever and only a few hawks struggled to obey. The Jorlith line held, dropped a man, closed up and held again, wavering but not breaking and not moving.
‘Retreat!’ Wingard and Wine’s voices joined hers. ‘Retreat!’ Now all the hawks were calling it, and finally the Jorlith and the few surviving thegns and churls heard. They’d planned for this moment for days, but plans were never forged strong enough to stay unbroken in the heat of battle. The Jorlith did it too slow, retreating one careful step at a time, spears still forward, as they’d spent years training to do. Her hawks tried their best but they were too locked into the battle, caught among the Brotherband with no hope of winning free.
‘Get down!’ she shouted instead, and Wine and Wingard echoed it, ‘Get down!’
She fell on he
r face, the twins beside her, and as she fell she yelled, ‘Set fire!’, put her hands over her head and hoped that all the rest had done the same.
There was a moment when nothing happened. Another moment when the Brotherband yelled their victory, and then a sound like nothing she’d ever heard. It filled her head to the brim, driving every thought out of it. It seemed to last for ever; her ears rang with it long after the detonation itself was past.
She felt the wind of the weapon’s discharge, the rush of many tiny things above her, as small as insects but far harder. Some of them were too low: they skimmed her skin and took it off. But the Brotherband were standing directly in the path of that deadly assault. Their screams were loud enough to replace the sound of the weapon.
She lay still and shocked for longer than she should have. Her body finally decided it was time to tell her all the damage it had suffered and she groaned in pain from a score of wounds. Her muscles shook with an exhaustion so extreme it was astonishing she’d managed to fight through it. Lifting herself to her knees felt like rolling a boulder up a mountain. It would be a while before she was able to rise to her feet.
But the vantage point from her knees was good enough. All the Brotherband warriors she could see nearby were dead or dying. The survivors were fleeing back into the deep ways, and she knew that in their place she would have done the same.
Alfreda’s weapons, hidden in the trees around the battlefield, had reaped a terrible harvest. There’d been no time to make them from metal as the smith’s design called for; they’d used the hollow bones of one of the great winged moon beasts instead. The screams of the dying were all over the battlefield, but Cwen could also hear them from one of the places where the weapons lay. She thought it might have exploded and killed its users.
But enough had worked. The small, round shot with which they’d packed the barrels had travelled through the Brotherband like a scythe. She thought there were Jorlith among the dead too, and hawks who hadn’t heard or heeded her command. It wasn’t always easy to tell; some of the bodies were so torn apart they were nothing more than meat and others had lost arms or legs or half their faces, chunks of flesh from their thighs.
She’d won this battle. In the quieter aftermath of the slaughter she could hear the sound of others drifting in. There were a score more entrances to the deep ways that they’d found and probably others they hadn’t. The distant clash of weapons was proof that the Brotherband had divided their forces as she’d feared. Here they’d fought to victory. She didn’t feel so confident about the rest.
Sang Ki had missed the battle entirely. If he were to be honest – and fortunately, no one asked him to be – he’d hardly hurried to the site of it once he realised the violence had begun.
He came to see the aftermath, though. His back ached and his feet were blistered, but he didn’t complain as he walked beside Cwen and those of her commanders who’d survived. They began at the site of the biggest battle, where the work of sorting the bodies was under way, churls sifting through the human debris to find those parts that might belong to friends and scavenge those things that once belonged to enemies.
It was a terrible slaughter, yet Sang Ki found himself unmoved by it. The smell of blood and shit and the buzzing of flies was foul, but he’d seen worse in the wreckage of Smiler’s Fair. He’d read that a man could become hardened to death. It was curious to find that it was happening to him.
That place was an unequivocal victory, and there were others. At the next site they visited – a sunken hole in the earth where the night roads came close to the surface – there were only Brotherband corpses. They’d found themselves unable to scale the steep earth sides with a force above sending arrows and spears down at them. One had tried to climb the vine lining the side of the chasm and died tangled in it along with his own guts.
The next site told the same story, but then the narrative began to change. They came to one place where the Jorlith dead were piled two high. The Brotherband had emerged in force from a rocky tunnel mouth and there hadn’t been enough Moon Forest folk to turn them back. The warriors overpowered their foes and disappeared among the trees.
There were nineteen battle sites all told and at eleven of them the tribesmen had been repelled. He saw Cwen’s expression harden as they visited place after place where the warriors had broken through. Even those who’d retreated from her own resounding victory might have found their way out elsewhere. And there could still be other entrances to the deep ways that they hadn’t found, places where the Brotherband had simply strolled from the earth and into the trees.
Could they call it a victory? Aethelgas and Ivarholme were safe, but the Moon Forest was now dense with their enemies. There would be more and bloodier battles and there could be no more simple ambushes. Every future fight would be on even terms, terms that favoured the hardened and ruthless warriors of the Brotherband.
When he and Cwen finished their tour, they returned to the hawks’ encampment. He saw that the Hunter’s people had gathered their own dead, a very great many of them.
‘A terrible loss,’ Sang Ki said to Cwen.
She nodded. Her eyes lingered on two of the corpses, girls barely flowered, with long blonde hair matted with blood.
‘You paid a painful price, but you saved many lives,’ he tried awkwardly.
She nodded again. He thought she might be weeping, but when she turned her face to him her eyes were clear and her expression stern. ‘The Hunter told me the fight would be hard. I didn’t understand, but I do now. Whatever it takes, whatever it costs.’ She looked again at the bodies of her dead hawks and then into the forest. ‘They can’t hide from me, them or their master. I’ll hunt down every last one of them in the Moon Forest, and then we’ll gather our army and hunt him down too.’
23
Surrounded by water, they were dying of thirst. Krish lay on the wooden deck, his face turned downward to press against the wood. A wave had soaked it and it was cool, soothing against his sunburnt skin.
‘Get up, brother,’ Dae Hyo said.
‘I don’t think I can,’ Krish told him, but the warrior put his hands in Krish’s armpits and hauled him to his feet.
‘Land,’ Dae Hyo said. ‘Look.’
Land wasn’t the problem, though. For the last week of their voyage they’d hugged the coast; they’d put to shore five times, but there’d been no rivers or springs, no fresh water at all. There was nothing but rock and sand, a shimmering pale yellow stretching to the horizon. He’d never seen a land like it, stripped of anything living. Even the rocks were as pale as bleached bones.
‘We’re here.’ Olufemi’s voice was no more than a dry croak and her lips cracked and bled as they stretched into a smile. ‘We’ve reached Mirror Town.’
But Krish could see only rock, rising into sheer white cliffs on the shore and scattered in twisted outcrops through the water. ‘There’s nothing here.’
‘It’s the Wracked Shore,’ Marvan said. The other man usually avoided speaking, as if he thought even on such a small boat they might forget he was there. But now he stood at Krish’s shoulder, peering not outward but down, into the sea.
They were sailing above a graveyard of ships. The water was so clear, Krish could see the rocky bottom a hundred paces below and the scores of wrecks that littered it. The ship beneath them was huge, its wooden sides gaping open like cracked ribs and its mast casting a long shadow across the ocean floor. Seaweed swathed it and Krish saw the skeletons of its dead crew.
‘I’ve read about this,’ Marvan said. ‘These are the vessels that brought the Fourteen Tribes to our land. The legend says they journeyed here in fourteen ships, but I suppose a little inaccuracy is to be expected.’
There were far more than fourteen. Krish lost count as they sailed above them, some as large as mammoths and others little bigger than their own boat.
Dae Hyo stared silently at the ocean floor and Krish remembered that this was the second mass grave of his people that he’d see
n. But when Krish reached out a hand to rest against Dae Hyo’s shoulder, his brother laughed. ‘I tell you what, now I know why we never tried to return from our exile. Those aren’t boats I’d want to sail.’
‘But they mean we’ve reached Mirror Town?’ Krish asked. He could see nothing beyond the white rocks on which the ships must have been driven to their destruction.
Olufemi’s bloodshot eyes strained forward. ‘Another mile, maybe a little more.’
Krish took his place back at the tiller to steer between the rocks as Marvan pulled the ropes that moved the sails. Dae Hyo remained in the bow, looking at the ships on the ocean floor below. And Krish watched Olufemi watching the shore until he saw her smile again. A thin trickle of blood ran from her cracked lip across her dark skin and she licked it up as her eyes stayed fixed on land.
‘There,’ she said, and pointed to a small deserted dock at the foot of the cliff. Krish pulled the tiller so that the boat curved through the water to reach it as Marvan spilled the wind from its sails to slow it to a stop. He leapt from the side to tie it fast and Dae Hyo lowered a plank to let them walk to land. It seemed to sway beneath Krish, as restless as the ocean.
Ahead a path wound up the cliff. The steps were even but steep and the group paused often on the climb. Krish felt his thirst more keenly now he knew he might soon slake it, and he was shaking and gasping for breath when they were only halfway up. The last fifty steps were smoother, running up the side of what was clearly a man-made wall – a defence, perhaps, though it was hard to imagine who might launch an attack here.
Then finally they reached its top. The sun blazed brilliantly down and shards of light lanced back, like a thousand fireflies hovering above the ground. Krish looked down, dazzled, and when he blinked the blaze away he saw Mirror Town.
The Hunter's Kind: Book II of The Hollow Gods Page 24