by David Drake
The artillery crews began cranking their lever arms back with small capstans, readying their weapons for another volley. The fleet commander and probably every man abovedecks realized that it would be vain effort. A second smoke plume, this one reddish white, billowed from the signal brazier.
The strokes of a few oarsmen aboard each vessel had enabled the ships to hold their distance from the margins of the raft. At the red signal the vessels began to move forward, their rams toward the mat. Beyond the fringe of branches and yellowing foliage, Hairy Men crouched and phantasms laughed silently.
The fleet could have avoided the raft's slow progress forever, but the island behind them could not. Sharina didn't recognize the dim outline, now hidden in the greater mass of the sea as the sun dropped below the horizon. All that mattered to the entity which commanded the Hairy Men was that the raft would ground on that shore sometime during the night, nothing else appearing; and that the sailors, for their own reasons, didn't dare let that happen.
One after another the warships made contact with the raft. A few approached at ramming speed, a fast walk, and tried to punch their way through the tangled barrier. That was like trying to row through an island.
Most were caught in branches that gave the way a noose flexes when a rabbit runs full-tilt into it. A few were still less fortunate: these collided with the axe-severed trunks of trees that were often thicker than a man was tall. Even bow timbers reinforced for ramming splintered at the impact, crushing enormous holes in the hulls. The sea rushed in, engulfing the oar benches.
The other captains approached with the same caution as they would have done if docking. Their vessels nuzzled the edges of the raft while petty officers shouted nervous commands to the oarsmen. Marine spearmen and archers scrambled onto the floating mass; behind them followed sailors carrying axes and saws.
While the marines faced the bobbing maze of trunks and branches, the sailors tried to cut the raft apart. From Sharina's viewpoint, looking down on an expanse of floating timber miles across, the hopelessness of the attempt was obvious. Even the men working at sea level, unable to judge the full extent of their task, must have doubted they could ever succeed.
Phantasms all across the forward edge of the raft pointed their smoky arms forward. The Hairy Men obeyed, tens of thousands of them scrambling up from cover and falling on the clumps of civilized humans. To Sharina, it was like watching the surf boil over a gravel strand.
Archers loosed one or sometimes two arrows before being crushed down by a club or a stone wielded by a long hairy arm. Spearmen thrust home, then watched their victims crawl up spearshafts to tear their killers' throats out before dying themselves. Often the soldiers toppled from wet trunks into a sea that drank them down, burdened as they were by the weight of armor.
The sailors either tried to defend themselves with their tools or, throwing the equipment aside, to scramble back aboard their vessels. The Hairy Men had three or four gripping hands apiece and in their native jungles had become far more familiar with moving across tangles like this one. They leaped open water and nets of branches, sometimes covering twenty feet in a single bound.
Screaming sailors were borne down by savage enemies. Sometimes they lived long enough to feel two or three of the Hairy Men chewing into their bodies in search of kidneys or other particular delicacies.
Catapults fired into the mass, with no more effect than a few score raindrops would have in extinguishing a grass fire. Captains and petty officers stricken by the suddenness of the disaster shouted conflicting orders to the oarsmen still aboard.
A few of the triremes started to back away, but only a few. Fewer still got far enough clear of the raft that the Hairy Men leaping under the phantasms' command didn't catch railings or the extended oars.
When the Hairy Men swarmed aboard a warship, all was chaos and butchery. The rowers were free men, but they had no weapons except the belt knives every sailor—or rural laborer—carried. They were packed too tightly to fight, and too demoralized by the completeness of the catastrophe even to organize under the command of their officers.
Knives and the officers' swords killed, but stones, clubs, and inch-long canine teeth killed faster and more horribly. Triremes wallowed as slaughter washed across them, filling the bilges with steaming blood.
Sharina felt nothing but mild curiosity as she viewed the slaughter. In her present state she understood everything but cared as little as if she were watching the wind pluck white foam from the tips of rising waves.
Surviving Hairy Men squatted on oarbenches meant for the longer, straighter limbs of civilized humans and grasped the oarlooms. Directed by the phantasms, the new rowers brought those ships that had drifted a distance from the raft back against its ragged margins.
More Hairy Men, young and old of either sex, leaped aboard. The warships had been crowded under their own crews, but this influx of half-men squeezed the narrow hulls the way a sheepfold fills in winter. A phantasm in the stern of each vessel gestured the stroke. Despite the crush, the oars now moved with the precision of wooden cogs engaging to drive a mill wheel.
The captured triremes—forty or so from a fleet of fifty—backed, then swung as one and made for the island lowering in what was now near-total darkness. The raft holding more tens of thousands of Hairy Men drifted along the same course but at the speed that wind and current drove it.
The admiral's flagship and two companion triremes still under the control of civilized humans sped away as fast as oars could drive them. They were visible only because the moon shone on the foaming oarthresh to either side of the hulls. Their destination was not the small island from which they had set out but the greater mass to the north and west of it.
Sharina watched as she might have watched the rain begin to pelt a neighbor's house; knowing that the storm would sweep on to her own dwelling, but unconcerned by what that would mean for her and hers.
“The trouble we'll have in fighting the kind of army a wizard raises,” said King Carus, leaning on his forearms with his lean, powerful fingers laced as he watched the battle, “is that they don't care if they're killed.”
He turned his head to grin at Garric's dream self and added, “Of course, lots of times they're dead to begin with.”
Garric had noticed how the king said “we'll have,” a quiet reminder that he and Garric were as close as a man and his shadow now. Garric grinned back. Closer, even: there was no darkness so complete that Garric could be without his ancestor's experience, skill, and steadfast, laughing courage.
On the moonlit field below, Carus' army fought an army of liches. Skeletons of the drowned dead, clothed in translucent slime, threw themselves on the human phalanx with the mindless insistence of rocks rolling downhill. The attackers carried rusty swords and spears whose shafts were barnacle-scaled. Some wore armor or rotted scraps of the garments they had drowned in, but most of the sexless monsters were glisteningly nude.
“You think the queen will send liches against us?” Garric asked. He'd fought the creatures before. They struggled even after they'd been hacked to bits. Only a stroke through the skull or the spine would permanently end a lich's lethal malevolence.
Carus shrugged. “It'll be something that doesn't have a mind of its own,” he said. “There's men who'll follow a wizard, but not many and not the sort with the discipline to make good soldiers.”
The phalanx was formed in a hollow square so that eight ranks faced in every direction. A younger King Carus stood on a mound of equipment at the center of the formation. Moonlight winked on the blade of Carus' long sword and the circlet of gold binding his hair.
“I wondered what I'd do if they retreated and I had to pursue,” the older Carus said, nodding toward the battle. “I needn't have worried: they kept coming as long as there was one left that could crawl. I never met a wizard I'd put in command of a company, let alone an army, and I don't guess you will either.”
The ground on three sides of the armored square was littered
with rotten bones and slick with the noisome ooze into which the liches' flesh dissolved when they died the second time. Rusty weapons lay among the foul debris.
None of the creatures had penetrated the hedge of spears. Though sometimes a lich hacked a pikehead off before another soldier rammed his point through the dead skull or spine, the wall remained unbroken. The jagged end of the pikestaff was still an effective weapon.
“But you've got a different problem, lad,” Carus said, turning to look at Garric. “I had an army; you've got a city to defend, and that's going to be a lot harder.”
“We're repairing the walls,” Garric said. “Pitre's in charge of that, though Tadai's finding the money to pay the laborers. We're getting a loan from a consortium of Serian bankers.”
He shook his head. Garric didn't wear the golden diadem when he slept, and thankfully it wasn't part of his dream either. The things that Prince Garric had to deal with made his mind spin.
“Wouldn't you think that people would just pitch in without being paid?” Garric said. He watched Carus' grin grow broader. “I mean, it's their lives if the queen comes back. They must know that!”
“They don't know it,” the king said, “and if they did, they'd still want to be paid.”
He shrugged. “And they still have to feed their families, after all. The folks you've got filling baskets with dirt and carrying stones aren't nobles and rich merchants who could live on their savings for a few days, lad. Most of them'll eat after nightfall when they're paid and dismissed, because they won't have anything to buy food with until then.”
Garric squeezed his hands together. Below the battle was nearing its conclusion, though the remnant of the lich army still writhed like a lizard's severed tail.
“This is what being a king is about?” Garric said. “Finding the money to pay laborers, and then finding the money to pay the bankers back? I don't know how we're ever going to pay off that loan!”
“It's not much like the epics, is it?” Carus said. He laughed. “You'll manage, lad.”
Suddenly grim he added, “Better than I did, at any rate, because I'll see to it that you don't let things slide the way I did.”
The younger Carus bent to call an order to the signalers waiting at the base of his vantage point. A trumpeter blew a double call. Company officers turned to see the detailed commands passed by torch because the moonlight was too dim to display flags clearly. Two faces of the square fell in along the flanks of the battalion between them and began to advance in the direction from which the attackers came. The fourth face, the battalion that hadn't really been engaged by the liches, faced about also and followed the main body of the phalanx as a ready reserve. The rear ranks of each company carried a double load of equipment, their own and that of the men ahead of them.
“I didn't like to move by night,” Carus said reflectively, “but I didn't want to give the wizard who was rebelling a chance to try again. His name was Abiba. Abiba the Great he called himself, until I hanged him that night. Maybe it was too easy to beat him.”
Garric frowned at the battlefield. The victory had been complete and there were few human casualties, that was true; but a less skillful human commander or a less disciplined army could have been lost to a man.
“It didn't look easy to me,” Garric said slowly.
“Ah,” said Carus. “But it let me think that so long as I had troops who wouldn't panic when they faced wizardry, then I didn't have to fear wizards. The Hooded One sank me and my men to the bottom of the Inner Sea because I didn't judge the real risks, just, the risks I'd beaten before.”
“Ah,” said Garric, nodding now that he really understood the king's point. “And what you said before about my job being harder because I have a city to defend instead of an army, you mean because the people will panic. A lot of them.”
Carus nodded grimly. “It isn't that soldiers are brave and civilians aren't, lad,” he said. “They're used to facing spearpoints, the veterans are, that's true; but my men and I had never seen anything like the liches before we tackled Abiba. It's a lot easier to face the unknown when you're standing shoulder to shoulder with people you trust. That's the advantage the soldier has.”
Garric swallowed. “We'll do what we can,” he said. “The walls should help, and I've got Attaper putting together a training scheme for a citizen militia. Even if they don't have much in the way of weapons, I thought people would like to feel they were helping. I thought of evacuating Valles, but I don't know that would make any difference. The queen could attack anywhere, after all.”
“There's a satisfaction to hanging a wizard that I never got out of arguing tax policy with the rulers of the separate islands,” Carus said, smiling crookedly. “I should've spent more time on the taxes, though, and learned more from the wizards I did hang. Well, you've got my mistakes to look at so you don't have to make them again.”
The field was empty now except for grass trampled to mud and the wrack of broken equipment and long-dead corpses. Looking down at the moonlit waste, Garric said, “Sir, I feel like I'm a piece of copper. I'm being hammered out so flat that you could see through me. Everybody has something they want... and I'm not sure there's going to be anything left unless they stop hammering.”
“They won't stop, lad,” Carus said softly. “Not till you're dead, and maybe not then.”
The king drew his long sword. The tang and crossbill were forged all as one piece with the blade; the edges had the sheen of oil trembling on water, smooth and as sharp as was consistent with the strength to shear through armor.
“I didn't have any choice about being king, Garric,” Carus said. “The Isles needed a strong hand. My hand, Carilan and his advisors all told me, and I wish they'd been right. I failed in the end because I misjudged a wizard, and the kingdom went down in blood and chaos.”
“Nobody could have done better than you,” Garric said. He squeezed the coronation medal from King Carus which he wore around his neck. His left hand squeezed it.
“You don't know that!” the king said in a rare flash of anger. His face softened and he smiled, then continued, “But you might be right. Well, what matters now is what you do, Prince Garric. And you don't have any choice either. You'll be King of the Isles because the Isles need you. All the people who live on the Isles need you. That's the part that's important, the people you serve.”
Carus raised his sword. Light came from no certain source to illuminate the dream balcony; it ran along the blade like a brook rippling over gray stones.
“This is a fine weapon, a marvel of craftsmanship,” he said, speaking to the steel rather than to Garric. “It will do whatever it's asked to do, until the moment it breaks. As I did, Garric.”
Carus turned to face the youth who was so nearly the mirror image of his own younger self. “And as you'll do. Because we do the jobs we have to, you and me and the swords in our hands.”
The king from ancient times laughed; and as he laughed, he began to fade along with the setting of which he was a part. Garric raised his head from the arms on which he'd pillowed it while dozing on the desk of his private office.
“Garric?” Liane called through the door. “Attaper is here with a report on the militia. Can you see him?”
It was so dark outside that Garric could barely tell the open window from the casement framing it. “Bring him in, Liane,” Garric called. He got up, feeling on the desktop for flint and steel to light a candle.
In Garric's dreams, with the strength of King Carus to support him, he could be a frightened boy. It was time to be king again.
Ilna’s lantern burned normally when she retrieved it from the floor of the cave, but she was surprised at how little oil remained in the large reservoir. She would have expected it to last all night without being refilled.
She walked up the remaining slope at a brisk pace. She didn't feel as cold as she had while descending, though the air had the chill to be expected from damp stone.
She reached the bend and the floo
r became level. The cave mouth was only a dim blur. Unless a storm had blown in from the sea, it was much later than Ilna had judged it from the length of time she thought she'd spent below ground.
“Something's coming!” a man said. His nervous voice echoed down the tunnel. Weapons rattled on other equipment and the stones they'd been leaned against.
“I'm coming out!” Ilna said. “What's the matter with you?”
She stepped onto the porch. Her escort stood with their backs to one of the huge pillars. Hosten flashed his sword; the four soldiers had their shields raised and held their spears for underhand thrusts.
“Is it really her?” a soldier said. “Of course it's me!” Ilna said, raising the lantern so that it shone directly on her face instead of lighting her from below. “You knew I was coming.”
Hosten sheathed his sword. “We hoped you were coming, Mistress Ilna,” he said, correcting her in a quiet voice.
He looked at the sky. The moon was well past zenith; Ilna had been in the cave much longer than she'd believed. “We'd best get back to the palace,” Hosten said, “or they'll think we don't plan to return. Unless...?”
He looked at Ilna and raised an eyebrow.
“Of course we're going back,” Ilna said, though in a milder tone than she might have used. She knew the courtier was trying to do her a service, the sort of act that made the world a better place. It wasn't Hosten's fault that Ilna found kindnesses much harder to accept than insults.
She handed the lantern to one of the soldiers. If it had been Ilna’s decision she would have snuffed the flame and returned to the carriage by moonlight alone, but the man kept it lit. The quivering yellow glow was very little use for lighting the broken roadway, but perhaps he found warmth in it.
“How did you find the cave, mistress?” Hosten asked in a tone of deliberate disinterest.
“I did what I went there to do,” Ilna said. They were in sight of the carriage. A horse whickered and the driver got up from where he'd been sleeping between the front wheels.