Isle of Woman (Geodyssey)

by Piers Anthony

  “Not if the defenders are apt.”

  He hesitated, uncertain. These were trying times.

  She made up his mind for him. “I will stand aloft!” she cried to the slaves. “You will help the soldiers protect me—and the goddess of ale—and the city.” She started up the ramp.

  “Follow her!” Crock bawled. Then: “Half to the other side!”

  Ember reached the top. “Go two to every soldier on the wall!” she cried. “Learn from that soldier. Help him in whatever way he directs. I want no sluggards defending me.” She walked to the place where the wall rose up to handle the gate, and stood there in a partial alcove, arms spread, her robe flowing in the wind. “These are noncombatants,” she called to the soldiers. “They will do whatever you say, so long as they touch no weapons.” She knew that the wind up here was making her words hard to distinguish, so that misunderstanding was possible. But she had officially done her part, remaining true to city policy.

  The slaves moved out. Some could be recognized because they had served the ale, earlier. The soldiers hesitated, but realized that there was no help other than this. They began the instruction. Ember saw some making throwing motions, demonstrating how to hurl a brick down without losing one’s balance and falling after it. Some were lifting bows, demonstrating the angle and pull required to find the range. Many were putting spare helmets on the slaves, and such armor as was available. The misunderstanding was in full swing. The slaves would not be able to perform as well as real soldiers, but the enemy would not know that, and might be daunted by the number of heads on the wall.

  Meanwhile the returning column was approaching the gate. There were too few men there. Ember spied the figure of Carver, but not that of Scorch. In that moment she knew the worst. But she refused to let her horror be known. She stood proudly on the wall, looking out.

  Already the enemy was coming. Those ranks were solid instead of intermittent. Light glinted from the massed shields. This was surely doom.

  They marched to just beyond arrow range. Those on the wall had the advantage, because their elevation gave them more distance. But they lacked the numbers and the energy of the attackers, as well as the experience. Only some unusual occurrence would save the city from conquest.

  But first the enemy had to breach the wall. They would try to do this by battering down the main gate. They would have a battering ram: a huge heavy log they would run with, crashing its end into the gate and bashing it open or down. Once that gate had been breached, they would simply charge into the city and lay it to waste.

  But they couldn’t do that if the men carrying the ram were shot down. So the archers on the walls would try to take down those men. If the men could not bring the ram, the gate would not come down, and the city would not fall. The challenges on either side were straightforward.

  There was a period of organization. Then a peculiar formation moved toward the gate. It looked from a distance like an enormous desert insect with glistening scales. Perhaps a weird thousand-legger. It crawled across the ground, jerkily, its parts not quite coordinated. What was it?

  Soon enough, she was able to piece it out. The bug’s central spine was the battering ram, an enormous log mounted on several sets of wheels. On either side of it were the brute men who pushed it forward. Beside each pusher was another man, who held his shield up over the pusher’s head and back. In this manner the pushers were protected from the arrows of the defenders, so that the ram could reach the gate.

  However, the shields would be less effective when the range shortened, and less still when it was time to get the ram moving swiftly enough to bash down the gate. The shieldmen would have trouble protecting both themselves and the pushers.

  Ember saw several of her slaves aim large bows and shoot their arrows out in high arches. Why weren’t the experienced bowmen doing it? Then she realized that this was because the ram party represented an excellent chance for practice, for learning to shoot the arrows effectively and finding the range. Few could aim accurately at the extreme range, but it was possible that some arrows would score randomly. Especially if there were enough of them. So the slaves practiced—and on occasion a pusher or his protector did fall.

  As the formation came closer, the slaves improved. Then the experienced bowmen joined them. Suddenly a swarm of arrows sailed down, and a number of enemy men fell.

  The enemy retreated, dragging away their wounded and dead. They left the great ram-log sitting on the road. It was safe there; no one from the city would go out to fetch it, because then they would be at a disadvantage. But they had won the first encounter by stopping the men around the ram. Some of the slaves were cheering.

  Ember knew it wouldn’t end there. Indeed, soon more men came out. This group carried linked shields that could be arched over the heads of the pushers, making them almost impervious to arrows from above. It was apparent that these were more experienced troops, and would be harder to stop. Perhaps the prior group had been mostly slaves, sent to test the mettle of the city defenders. So slaves had been killing slaves.

  The new group formed around the ram, and it resumed motion. Arrows rained down, but no men fell. The protection was tight.

  But as it came close to the gate, the defenders started throwing bricks. These were not building bricks, but large, ragged ones with many projecting corners. They had more mass than the arrows did, and when one struck a shield, the shield bearer felt it. The shields lost their placement, and a few arrows were able to get through to score. But not enough; the ram continued to move forward. As it got close, it gained speed, making it harder to score on.

  Then the slaves on the wall closest to the gate went into another type of attack. They heaved up big bags of sand and flung them out to land on the shields. This time the shields were crushed down to the ground, their bearers caught beneath them. The sheer weight of sand and the speed at which it struck were breaking down the formation. Whenever a shield went down, the pusher was exposed, and the arrows of the experienced bowmen quickly brought him down. But this defense was limited, because only those right next to the gate could hope to reach the battering ram, and it was hard to heave the heavy bags far enough out. So the ramming crew was battered, but not destroyed.

  Still, it was enough to slow the progress of the ram, so that it was likely to lack the force needed to break down the gate. The enemy force retreated a second time, forced to leave a number of dead behind. The defenders had won again. There was another cheer. But Ember was sure that this was not the end of it. The battering ram was now close to the gate, and if another crew were able to get to it, the gate would not last long.

  A third mission came forth. But it did not go for the ram. This time the shield bearers protected bowmen, and the bowmen got close to the wall—and fired up at the defenders. Ember realized that they had decided that they could not move farther without reducing or eliminating the defenders, who it seemed had put up more resistance than expected.

  The attack was devastating. The enemy archers were experts. Every arrow seemed to find its target. Suddenly slaves were slumping, arrows embedded in their bodies. Inexperienced, they had forgotten that they could be targets, too.

  The survivors quickly got behind the solid projecting outer rim of the wall. But that single sally had taken out perhaps a third of them.

  Ember realized, belatedly, that no arrows had come close to her. Had the enemy archers realized that she was only an unarmed woman, so they hadn’t bothered with her? If so, so much for her heroic stance. But probably they just hadn’t shot accurately enough. Yet. She had been lucky.

  In the brief period of panic and dismay on the wall, the enemy quickly resumed its formation with the battering ram. “The ram!” Ember cried as the thing started to move. “Stop it!”

  This time an arrow did come for her. It stung her right hip. She reeled, almost falling off the wall before dropping to her belly. Then the pain surged forth from her hip.

  She heard a crash, and knew that elsewhere in
the world the ram was pounding the gate. Their defense had faltered. The city was about to fall.

  After that she faded in and out, hearing the commotion in the city as the enemy troops ravaged it. She had done what she could, and her loyal slaves had helped, but it had not been enough. There were not many men left to kill, but she heard the screams of the women being raped. She hoped one of them was not Crystal.

  “Ember!”

  She came alert. It was Carver, Crystal’s husband. “Hide!” she cried. “Before they kill you!”

  He smiled. “They don’t kill old women. They ignore them as being neither desirable nor dangerous. Come; I will help you down.”

  Now she saw that he had shaved his beard, making him woman-faced. He wore the voluminous robe of an old crone. He had marked his face and hands to look spotted and aged. Smart young man!

  He lifted her and put an arm around her. They walked. Ember’s right leg was stiff and caked with blood from her wounded hip, but she could tell that her wound was not mortal. The arrowhead seemed to have been deflected from the bone of her hip, gouging flesh and falling away. Pain was her only problem, and she clenched her teeth against it, knowing that otherwise it would be death she faced.

  They were the only people on the wall now; further attempts at defense had become pointless when the gate went down. The enemy men didn’t care about the wall, as long as there was no attack from it; in due course they would man it with their own bowmen and sandbaggers, defending the city from other enemies.

  They made their way down to the ground inside the city. Men wearing the badge of Umma seemed to be active everywhere, burning, looting, pillaging, and killing any who protested. The two seeming old women hurried out of their way, and were duly ignored. Already the activity was winding down; there was only so much loot to be taken, and only so many young women to be raped.

  There wasn’t even much rubble in their section of the city. The men of Umma were not destroying buildings they expected to take over and use themselves. Carver helped Ember along the narrow, winding street and finally into her house. This was the one Scorch had bought when they came to Girsu, in the upper-class district. It was rectangular, with two stories and a central open courtyard. It even had its own little shrine, for the goddess Ninkasi, next to the storage room where barley and ale were kept.

  He brought her to the courtyard, because that was cooler than the chambers, and she lay on a mat, staring at the sky. “I’ll fetch the others,” he said.

  She faded out again. She was aware of Crystal, and of four-year-old Flower, tending her as the fever came. Carver was in and out, still using his old-woman disguise. But not Scorch.

  In her fever dreams, Ember saw her husband again and again. As a young man, whom she had vamped and married when barely nubile, because he worked with fire. And because his eyes were green, like hers. She had tried desperately to persuade him that she was old enough for him, and had succeeded. Then Crystal had come, and Scorch had been good with her, showing her the things of the world. He had been there too when they had traveled from their old town to Girsu, where there was better employment. And when Crystal had grown up and married Carver. And especially when Crystal had wanted to become a scribe: Scorch had talked with friends and worked hard behind the scenes, as had Ember herself, and together they had managed to get her into the apprenticeship training. She had been the only female in her class, and might have washed out if the increasing power of the temple had not protected her. But Ember could not have helped enough, if Scorch had not supported her fully.

  Now he was gone, and her overriding emotion was remorse. He had been such a good man, always supportive, even when she had been caught in a bad situation and gotten herself raped. They had never spoken of that, later, but he could have divorced her for it, had he chosen to. She owed him everything—and had never really delivered. Because always in the back of her fancy had been the nebulous image of her ideal man, the one to whom her true love belonged. She had never truly given herself to Scorch—and now could never do so.

  When the fever faded and her injury started healing, Ember revived and took an interest in the condition of the family. There were now four of them, in three generations; Carver, Crystal and Flower had joined Ember in her house. Their situation was desperate. Their store of food had been exhausted, including a few dates Carver had salvaged from their share of the city’s garden plot, and there seemed to be no good way to get more. Carver, garbed as an old woman, was unemployable. If he assumed his true form, he would be immediately killed. The extent to which males were being hunted down after the conquest was unusual; normally conquering armies collected their booty, slaves and the icon of the fallen god and returned to their own city to enjoy the spoils. But the conflict between these two cities had festered for 150 years, and the king of Umma, Lugalzaggisi, seemed to have larger ambition.

  Crystal, now twenty-two years old and attractive, could not admit she was a scribe; the conquerors were routinely killing or deporting all local officials. Neither could she go out to beg, because any Umma soldier who saw her would simply haul her to his home as a concubine. Little Flower had to remain completely hidden, because any child was subject to induction into the slave corps; the best slaves were those who were started young, so that any resistance could be beaten out of them.

  That left Ember. As priestess, she had had power, but now the temple was out of business, replaced by the conqueror’s male god, and Ember had to hide her identity. The brewery was actually attached to the main temple of Ningirsu, the patron god of Girsu; Ninkasi was a minor goddess, despite the importance of her ale to the folk of the city. The Ummites would tear down the idols of Ningirsu and replace them with those of their god Shara, son of Inanna, hero of An. Thereafter the Lady Who Fills the Mouth would serve Shara, if they allowed her temple to remain at all. More likely they would raze it along with the main temple, once they got organized, and build their own brewery. Meanwhile Ember, as an anonymous old woman, was worthless. They certainly would not want her for raping or for slavery. What could she do?

  She must have been thinking about this during her fever, because it was as if she remembered Scorch coming to her and telling her that the welfare of the family depended on her. She had to organize things so they could survive and even prosper. “But how?” she asked the memory, and had no answer.

  As she struggled with it, an answer slowly formed from the chaos of her fever and grief. Their reduced family had skills; the thing was to organize them for survival. If they worked together, they could do it.

  She explained it to them. “By ourselves, we are useless. We all have to hide our real identities, lest we be punished for being male or literate or young or a temple official. We dare not show our skills openly to the conquerors. But we can make use of them if we are circumspect, and if we work closely together.”

  “Mother, are you running another fever?” Crystal inquired anxiously.

  “Let me explain. The Umma folk have the same need of our skills as our own administration did. A city doesn’t run itself; it needs trained personnel, from garbage haulers to temple builders. Right now the Umma soldiers are in a destructive frenzy, but when they start getting hungry because there are no gardeners and thirsty and dirty because no water flows in the public troughs and bored because there are no dancing girls, they will settle down and let the old personnel operate unhampered. They will want servants, and they will have to feed them if they want any enduring loyalty. They will want new clothing, and they will have to pay for it if they want it made well. They will want jewelry, and they will have to pay for that too. The time of rapine and pillage is brief; they have to stop soon, or there will be nothing left, and they will find themselves alone and mired in filth. So they will change. What we have to do is determine what they will need, and what they will pay for, and have it ready.”

  “Every surviving old person in the city wants to be a servant,” Crystal remarked sourly. “The young ones can’t risk coming forward,
for the same reason we can’t.”

  “Yes,” Ember agreed. “So we have to decide what we can provide that others can’t. We have among us an administrator, a scribe, and an artisan. Our skills remain, but not our employments. Scorch could have had immediate work, forging weapons and armor for the conquerors. But managing and scribing are problematical. That leaves Carver.”

  “I worked for the temple too,” he reminded her. “I don’t dare practice my skills of sculpture in wood, metal or stone.”

  “Your skill is one thing, your sculpting another. We need to find a new application for your skill.”

  The others looked at her blankly. “How can he sculpt without sculpting?” Crystal asked.

  “By calling it something else. There is unrecognized art in many things. Such as the ornate handle of a good pickax, or the design of a house.”

  “I don’t know how to—”

  “But you could make a very fancy seal,” Ember said.

  “A seal! That’s tiny!”

  “Yes. You would have to take time to work with fine tools, to make very delicate pictures for the seal. No two seals are ever the same, and a truly fancy seal should be valuable. One made from metal, perhaps. I think the conquerors would pay well for custom-designed seals.”

  Carver nodded. “I think I could do that. But I can’t go and talk to a conqueror.”

  “You can’t. But Crystal could.”

  “He’d enslave me for concubinage!” Crystal protested.

  Ember nodded, reassessing it. “Yes, that risk remains. Later, when things are settled, a young woman may be able to go safely, but not yet. Then I will have to do it. Old women are safe from that.”

  “But if anybody recognized you—”

  “We shall have to hope they don’t.” Ember considered. “We must have some sample wares. What do we have for making seals?”

  “I have my tools at home,” Carver said. “I could carve something in wood. But I don’t have the equipment to make fire-hardened brick, or to melt metal.”