Mordant's Need

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  And the next morning, he pressed his attack.

  Well, they have to run out of oil sometime.

  It seemed a rather thin tactic on which to hinge Alend’s hopes for survival, never mind victory. Nevertheless he persisted. He simply didn’t have any better ideas. With enough time, he could have sat where he was in perfect safety, discussing governance with his father, or with the lady Elega, training his forces – and waiting for Orison to starve itself into submission. That was the way sieges were supposed to go. But nothing that had anything to do with King Joyse ever went the way it was supposed to go. And as for High King Festten—

  If the Prince could use up Orison’s supplies of lamp oil, cooking oil, flammable grease, he might be able to bring his battering rams to bear on the gates more effectively. All he needed was to get the gates open.

  He knew he had enough men to overwhelm the castle, if he could just get the gates open.

  Around midafternoon that day, while the fifth of Prince Kragen’s makeshift rams burned like a bonfire, Terisa and Geraden sighted Batten and left the road to work eastward around the city.

  This was one of the tricky parts, Geraden explained. Here they had to cross Alend’s supply route. The danger of encountering Alend soldiers was now severe. And the Armigite’s scouts or spies would almost certainly be concentrated along the lines where Alend forces were expected. Geraden and Terisa slowed their pace almost to a walk; and he spent long moments on the crest of every rise, straining his eyes toward the horizons. From time to time, he found a tree and climbed it to study the terrain from that vantage.

  For no good reason except that she saw nothing – not even the walls of the city, once she and Geraden had left the road – she began to think these pauses for caution were unnecessary. They crossed the unmistakable swath of ground which had brought the Alend army to the road – unmistakable because the soil still held the cut of wheels, the gouge of hooves, the pressure of boots – but they didn’t see any sign of Alend supply wains or Armigite spotters. She would have preferred the risk of speed to the frustration of delay.

  She changed her mind, however, when he came down out of a tree so fast that he nearly fell like the fumblefoot he had once been. Hissing instructions rapidly, he dragged the mounts into a nearby thicket; with her help, he forced the beasts to lie down, then did his best to muffle their noses, prevent them from whickering as the other horses came near.

  A small band of riders with grime-caked clothes and eyes made evil by fear passed so close that Terisa could have hit them with a stone.

  ‘Mercenaries,’ Geraden grated under his breath after the riders were gone. ‘Men like that – if they were in a hurry, they might cut your throat before they raped you.

  ‘I thought every mercenary in the world worked for Cadwal.’

  Terisa was having trouble with her pulse. ‘Then what’re they doing here?’

  He shrugged stiffly, as if all his muscles were in knots. ‘Working for somebody else. Or spying for the High King. If the Lieges send Prince Kragen reinforcements, Festten will want to know about it. He may have men all over this part of Mordant by now.’

  Oh, good, Terisa muttered to herself. Just what we need.

  She and Geraden had to hide twice more before the end of the day, but both times they were able to avoid discovery with relative ease. The scouts or mercenaries expected many things, but they clearly didn’t expect to encounter a man and a woman with three horses cutting across open ground around Batten.

  In a fireless camp that night in a small gully, she remarked, ‘I can’t live this way.’

  ‘What, sneaking around like this? Surrounded by people who would gut us unless they had the good sense to take us prisoner if they only knew we were here? You aren’t having fun?’ Geraden snorted softly. ‘Terisa, I’m surprised at you.’

  Actually, she was surprised at herself. Without warning, she was filled with a sense of how strange her circumstances were. Wasn’t she Terisa Morgan, the passive girl who had typed sad letters for Reverend Thatcher until she had lost faith in him and his mission? Wasn’t she the lonely woman who had decorated her apartment in mirrors because she didn’t know any other way to prove she existed? So what was she doing here? – surrounded, as Geraden observed, by enemies; struggling across country on horseback in a nearly crazy effort to warn King Joyse that his wife had been abducted; so angry at Master Eremis that she couldn’t think about it without trembling. What was she doing?

  ‘So am I,’ she murmured; but Geraden had been teasing her, and she was serious. The night on all sides felt at once vast and subtle, too big to be faced, too cunning to be escaped. And the stars— She knew in her bones that the city where her apartment was had nowhere near this many stars watching it. ‘Right now, it seems like there isn’t another place in the universe farther away from where I used to live than this.’

  ‘Are you afraid?’ he asked gently. ‘We still have a long way to go.’

  He wasn’t talking about the distance to Orison.

  ‘That’s the funny part,’ she mused. ‘When I stop and take my pulse, I get the impression I’ve never been so scared in all my life. But when I think about where I came from’ –my apartment, my job, my parents – ‘I think I’ve never been so brave.’

  After a while, he said, ‘It makes an amazing difference when you have good, clear reasons for what you’re doing. I think I used to have so many accidents because I was confused. In conflict with myself.’

  She agreed, but she didn’t say so. Instead, she said, ‘Don’t get cocky. I saw you almost fall out of that tree.’

  That made him laugh. And his laughter always made her feel better.

  Prince Kragen also had reasons for his actions.

  What he was doing was unprecedented. Despite the darkness – despite the fact that his men couldn’t see Orison’s counterattacks in time to defend themselves very well – he was belaboring the gates with the heaviest battering ram he had.

  He had two reasons for risking the blood of his army so lavishly, one immediate, the other alarming.

  His immediate reason was that just before sunset the defenders had stopped pouring oil on the shells of his rams. The particular ram spared by this forbearance wasn’t especially impressive: its shell protected only enough men to move it, not enough to seriously threaten the gates. Nevertheless the forbearance itself was significant. Without hesitation, the Prince called back that ram and sent out a bigger one, fully manned.

  This one, also, was allowed to do its work without being set afire.

  Two interpretations immediately suggested themselves. Orison was out of oil. Or Orison was trying to conserve oil – was trusting the dark for protection.

  Under other circumstances, this chance to hit the gates wouldn’t have been worth the risk. At night, protected by darkness from archers, the castle’s defenders would be able to swing down from the walls on ropes and strike at the ram in a matter of minutes. But the Prince was too worried to miss any opportunity, however costly it might prove.

  He was alarmed because during the afternoon his scouts had intercepted two hacked and dying men who were apparently the last survivors the Perdon would ever send to Orison.

  They weren’t actually sure of their lord’s fate. When he sent them away, he still had several hundred men around him, was still fighting. But he knew he was finished. He sent these two soldiers to warn King Joyse.

  They were too badly hurt to last the night; but Prince Kragen pieced their story together from their confused and feverish babblings. What had apparently happened was that High King Festten had suddenly changed his tactics. He had halted his unexplained march into the Care of Tor: for a while, he had even stopped striking at the Perdon. Instead, he had camped his huge army as if he had gained his goal, as if his only real purpose had been to capture the ground where he now stood – a relatively uninhabited region of complex hills and thin rivers no closer to Marshalt than to Orison.

  And then, while the Perdon was s
till trying to figure out what Festten was doing, the High King had sent out nearly five thousand soldiers to encircle and trap the lord. In the end, only the terrain had enabled these two wounded men to escape. They had hidden in a tree-clogged ravine until darkness allowed them to creep away northward.

  How many days ago? Prince Kragen wanted to know. How far exactly? In fact, he wanted to know so badly that out of raw frustration he was tempted to resort to some of the harsher forms of questioning. But it was obvious that the Perdon’s men, in effect, had already been tortured past the point where they were able to think or speak coherently. Prince Kragen was left with very little idea when they had left their lord, or where Festten was.

  So he attacked Orison’s gates at night, despite the losses he knew he was going to incur. He was afraid: he could feel a kind of doom stalking him through the dark. An enemy who would march at least twenty thousand men that far into the middle of nowhere – in this case, the middle of the Care of Tor – for no discernible purpose except to make camp was capable of anything.

  Through the hours of darkness, Kragen listened to the flat, dull booming of the ram against the gates, to the shouts of the defenders and the cries of his own forces – listened, and ground his teeth to restrain his rage at a war he couldn’t either avoid or understand.

  Castellan Lebbick appeared to be in a completely different mood. If he felt any desire to rage, he didn’t show it. From the battlements above the gate, he watched the massive Alend ram at work with a twisted expression on his face, as if something inside him were being torn; yet he didn’t so much as raise his voice or curse. He didn’t even grin. For no very clear reason, he muttered in disgust words that sounded to the guards around him like, ‘fool woman.’ Then he called for ropes and began mustering men to fight for the gates.

  He didn’t stay to watch the struggle, however. A number of his captains knew what to do in a situation like this. Wandering away like a shadow of the man he used to be, he went to spend as much of the night as possible drinking with Artagel.

  Unfortunately, ale – even in that quantity – did nothing to quench the hot, dry sensation in his mind. He was full of foreboding; his brain chewed anticipations of disaster. So he was grimly amazed when he woke up the next morning and learned that something good was happening.

  It was raining.

  A hard rain, so thick that it blinded the castle and turned the dirt of the courtyard into immediate soup; what the people where Lebbick had grown up called a real gully-washer. And long overdue: Mordant expected rain like this in the spring.

  Of course, it made Orison impossible to defend. The guards above the gates wouldn’t have known if the entire Alend army had come within a stone’s throw of their noses.

  On the other hand, the rain also made attack impossible.

  The Alends had no footing. They could bring up battering rams until they broke their hearts; but they couldn’t swing them effectively. The gates would stand forever against any pounding they might receive in this rain. And other siege engines were equally useless.

  The rain didn’t cheer Castellan Lebbick up. He was past the point where anything could have cheered him. But it did give him a breathing space, a bit of time in which to get a better grip on himself.

  It also helped Terisa and Geraden.

  That surprised her. She got so wet and so cold so quickly that she felt defeated before the day had well begun. She soon realized, however, that she and Geraden were in next to no danger of being spotted or captured through this downpour. If she had let him get more than ten feet away, she wouldn’t have been able to spot him herself.

  Now the trick had nothing to do with being stopped. The trick was to know where they were going.

  ‘How do you know we’re not lost?’ she shouted into the deluge.

  ‘The rain!’ Despite the water streaming down his face, he grinned. ‘At this time of year, it always comes from the west! We’re going south, so all we have to do is cut across the wind!’

  She would have been impressed if her whole body hadn’t felt so miserable.

  Nevertheless she kept going; she and Geraden kept each other going. While their enemies were blinded was the best time for them to go forward. The rain might make it impossible for Torrent to follow her mother; but Terisa was too cold and soaked to worry about something that far out of her control. She concentrated solely on Geraden and motion until the storm finally blew away an hour or two before sunset, and he had an opportunity to find his bearings.

  ‘Tomorrow.’ There was relief in his voice; yet she had never heard him sound so tired. ‘We’ll be in the Demesne tomorrow morning. Tomorrow afternoon or evening we’ll reach Orison.’

  Just for something to say, she muttered, ‘If Prince Kragen doesn’t give me some dry clothes, I’m going to spit right in his face.’

  Geraden nodded his approval. ‘Just don’t kick him. I’ve heard princes tend to get cranky when they’re kicked.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ she retorted. ‘I’ve been on a horse for as long as I can remember, and my whole body hurts. I’m going to kick anybody I want.’

  Again, he nodded. ‘You may have to.’ It was obvious that his thoughts were elsewhere. ‘We’ve been carrying a lot of questions around for a long time. Tomorrow we’ll start getting answers. You may have to kick everybody we meet.’

  Terisa refused to worry about that. All she wanted at the moment was to be warm and dry.

  The inhabitants of Orison had the opposite reaction: they prayed for more rain.

  Unluckily, they didn’t get it. By the next morning, the ground was dry enough for Prince Kragen to resume his attack.

  The mud was still thick: a sea of it surrounded Orison. But decades or centuries of use had packed the roadbed hard; it gave the Alends enough footing to put some heft into the swing of their ram.

  Protected by shields and shells, nearly a thousand men edged close to the walls to ward the ram as it hammered the gates. Every blow seemed to carry through the stone to the tops of the towers, the bottoms of the dungeons.

  In response, Castellan Lebbick’s guards cranked up mangonels powerful enough to dent iron and splinter wood. The mangonels shattered Alend shields almost effortlessly, reduced the flesh under the shields to pulp and crushed bone. Lebbick didn’t have many of the ponderous crossbows, however. And his men had to fire scores of lead bolts in order to damage the shell protecting the ram.

  Slowly, inevitably, one blow at a time, the gates began to fail.

  The wood started to compress and crack; stress showed along the iron strutwork; mortar sifted from between the stones which held the gates in the wall; bolts began to work loose.

  At the moment, Prince Kragen was paying for this success with dozens and then hundreds of his men. Inside the castle, Orison’s defenders suffered no losses. But that imbalance would shift as soon as the gates broke.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Lebbick muttered, inspecting their timbers with an expert eye. ‘Those shitlickers’ll be in here tomorrow. We’ve got that long to live.’

  He didn’t sound upset. He didn’t even sound angry.

  He sounded satisfied.

  Dutifully, he sent a report to King Joyse. Then he reduced Orison’s defenders to a minimum. Every guard who could be spared he ordered away to spend as much time as possible with whatever friends or family the man had left.

  His wife would have approved of that.

  Amiably, Artagel asked him, ‘What do you suppose King Joyse will do to save us?’

  Entirely without warning, Castellan Lebbick recovered his rage. ‘The way our luck’s going’ – he was clenching his teeth so hard his forehead felt like it might crack – ‘he’ll challenge Prince fornicating Kragen to a duel.’

  With fury crackling in every muscle, he left the gates and the courtyard. While he was angry, at least, he couldn’t bear to watch what was happening.

  Like the Prince, he had no way of knowing that Terisa and Geraden were already in the Demesne.

 
; Late that afternoon, they rode as if they were fearless straight up to the first Alend patrol they met and demanded to be taken to the lady Elega.

  Swords and distrust surrounded them promptly. Terisa’s mount showed a distressing inclination to shy in all directions; she had to fight to keep the beast under control. She was conscious that the weather had turned chilly since the previous day’s rain. Alends? she wondered. Not Cadwals? Does that mean Orison is still standing? But she had no intention of asking those questions aloud. After all, these soldiers were dressed and armored just like the men who had taken Queen Madin.

  The leader of the patrol snapped, ‘What makes pigslop like you two think you’ve got a reason to see the Prince’s lady?’

  Geraden’s mouth smiled, but his eyes were hard. ‘We’re servants,’ he answered with a hint of danger in his voice. ‘Our parents have served her family since before we were born. We grew up with her.

  ‘We’ve come from Romish. The Queen sent us to see her.’

  The Alend leader snarled a curse. ‘The Queen? Madin, that shithole Joyse’s wife?’

  The effort of controlling her horse disguised Terisa’s face as effectively as a mask. Geraden’s expression was positively serene: only his eyes threatened to betray him. ‘So you’ve heard of her,’ he said blandly. ‘Good. Then you’ll understand that the lady Elega won’t take it kindly if you prevent us from delivering our messages.’

  ‘Queen Madin?’ the Alend repeated in a voice congested with hostility. ‘You’ve got messages from Queen Madin?’

  Geraden’s mouth smiled again. ‘My, you are quick.’ Then, softly, he said, ‘Take us to see the lady Elega.’

  A little thrill touched Terisa’s heart as she heard the authority in his tone.

  The leader of the patrol hesitated; he was taken aback – a fact which seemed to surprise him. To compensate, he growled an obscenity. Then he said, ‘I think the Prince is going to want to hear your messages.’