Haven: A Trial of Blood and Steel Book Four

by Shepherd, Joel

  Myklas looked at Koenyg, frowning. Koenyg did not look at him.

  “Sofy,” he said, “you are lawfully married, before the gods themselves. You shall shame all Lenayin should you now choose to fight against your husband.”

  Sofy looked him calmly in the eye. “Lenayin fights with me,” she said. “True Lenayin. I do not know what you are, but you are an imposter upon my land. And my husband, and all who follow him, shall always be its enemies.”

  Sasha walked through her army's camp behind the western wall. Men sat by their fires and talked, or repaired damaged gear, or prepared to sleep. Most did not wear armour, not fearing a sudden attack in the night. Any force that included the talmaad would own the night, and the Regent's men knew it.

  She exchanged greetings and words of encouragement as she walked to the small town where the Ilmerhill and Dhemerhill Rivers converged. Here Sofy had arranged a hub of wagons moving supplies and wounded. Upon the spit of land between converging rivers there was a grand house of several storeys, and a garden. Spilling onto the garden were many talmaad, Ilduuris, and Lenays who had heard a rumour that good food could be found here.

  Sasha could smell it as she approached the kitchen, fresh bread and cooking meats. Within the kitchen, she found mixed human and serrin staff, mostly women, preparing meals that were certainly not an army's standard ration. Soldiers queued though the night grew late, thinking a delicacy—perhaps a final delicacy—to be well worth the effort.

  Directing it all, Sasha found Aisha, of course, moving amidst the cooks while suggesting spices and tasting sauces. She saw Sasha and smiled, her eyes a little red. Sasha hugged her, and Aisha seemed to collapse for a moment in her arms.

  They'd found Daish's horse during the Rhodaani Steel's retreat, dead in a charred circle of hellfire. His body they'd not identified, though someone had thought it significant that a messenger had died, and reported the loss. It seemed that a Rhodaani cavalry commander had sent him to carry an order to the main formation that trumpets could not deliver—no one knew what, for the commander was now dead too, like so many Rhodaanis. But Daish had galloped forward when the Rhodaani cavalry had been retreating, and given that his horse was reported as being little more than charred meat, death would have been instantaneous. Sasha hoped.

  Aisha released herself, wiping her eyes. They did not need to speak of it.

  “Did you hear also Bergen?” Sasha asked gently.

  Aisha nodded. “In the first engagement with Lenay cavalry, I was told. And three dear friends in the talmaad, serrin you have not met.”

  “Where's Rhillian?” Sasha asked.

  “Hunting,” said Aisha. In the dark, with a serrin's eyes. Many serrin would sleep little tonight. “I thought I could make a better use of my time here. I always cook when unhappy. And there's nothing like a war to remind people to appreciate the sweet things in life.”

  “Just don't make it too sweet or they'll not want to fight at all.” Aisha smiled. “I'm looking for Kessligh—have you seen him?”

  She found Kessligh up at Liri, the small town overlooking the western wall from the southern junction of where the Ilmerhill Valley joined the Dhemerhill. He sat on the balcony of a house filled with officers, discussing the day's battle just passed, and how it might be improved upon tomorrow.

  Sasha drew up a chair and sat beside him. The night was cloudy, and there was no visible moon. Across the junction of valleys and rivers, the campsites of the defending armies sparkled with thousands of fires. Upon the far side of the Ilmerhill Valley, Jahnd itself was alive with lantern and torchlight, with great fires burning bright atop its defensive wall. Across the valley floor, the city's outer sprawl was lit with less magnificence, yet here above could be heard the unceasing hammering of the workshops.

  “How's Koenyg?” Kessligh asked, with faint irony.

  “Didn't take my bait,” said Sasha, putting her feet up on another chair. Kessligh poured her some water. He did not like to drink anything stronger in battle. Sasha accepted her cup, and drank. “Nearly, though. I made him pretty angry.”

  “You have that gift with quieter tempers than Koenyg's. Would you have killed him, had he accepted immediate challenge?”

  “Yes,” said Sasha. “You?”

  Kessligh shrugged. “In Lenayin a man does not speak of killing another man whose sibling is present. Family deals with family.”

  “Don't worry,” said Sasha. “If I can, I will.” She sipped again. “Sofy was wonderful. But her appeals are wasted on the Army of Northern Lenayin, I think. Koenyg is only more convinced that we pagan-friendly royals are a cancer to be cut from the body of Lenayin. Myklas is troubled. I should be sad to kill Myklas.”

  The words nearly caught in her throat. She coughed with annoyance, and covered it with another drink.

  “He is a naive, misled boy,” Kessligh said quietly. “But a good lad. We always wondered when he would find something meaningful in his life—the last-born son always struggles for purpose. Unfortunately he has found his meaning with the Hadryn.” Kessligh paused. “You think to use Sofy against the Regent himself? Request a truce flag and have her speak to the Bacosh lords?”

  “I'm thinking on it,” said Sasha, “but I don't know what she could say. Few of them have any sympathy for her. Her defection only convinces them that the allegiance with Lenayin was a mistake. It certainly makes Koenyg's position with the Regent precarious, but only after this battle is over, which doesn't help us at all.”

  Kessligh agreed. “They tell themselves they fight for a future of peace and unity, but if they win it will be back to the old feudal squabbling and a new war for every season, just like the old days. But no, however weak the Archbishop's and the Elissians' defiance in trying to kill Sofy makes Balthaar look, it doesn't help us now. They'll postpone that argument until after we're all dead.”

  “We had a good day today,” said Sasha, “all things considered. Tomorrow will be much worse: we've lost our best position.”

  “I was speaking with the Ilduuris,” said Kessligh. “That defence of the ridge was one of the best demonstrations of battlefield command they've seen. Your senior sergeants are the ones holding the formation together, and always the hardest to please—I've spoken to several this evening who would happily die for you. That says everything.”

  “And after today,” said Sasha, “I for them. I was not impressed with Ilduur when I first arrived there. But after today, a part of my heart shall be forever Ilduuri.” She smiled at him. “Coming from one as blindly in love with Lenayin as I, that says everything.”

  Kessligh sat forward in his chair and indicated the valley before them, lit with campfires. “I wanted to ask you then,” he said. “From one who has just forced the largest army in history to pay a far bloodier price for a bit of high ground than they'd wanted to, look at the valleys before us, and tell me what you see.”

  “Armies,” said Sasha, tiredly. Kessligh had done this to her often, when she was his uma. Asked questions in the form of a lecture. She'd thought she was a little beyond that now. “Darkness. Walls.”

  “Exactly,” said Kessligh. He wasn't looking at her. He was staring into the night, as though seeing something that other eyes could not, in the way that Errollyn might see something in the night that was to her invisible. “A great commander sees it. Armies. Darkness. Walls. What do they remind you of, put together?”

  Sasha did not think too hard. She thought she knew what Kessligh was striving at. “Prison,” she said. “Dungeons beneath Tracato. Pain.” Alythia's severed head lying at her feet in a cell. She squeezed her eyes shut.

  “Confinement,” said Kessligh. Sasha opened her eyes once more, and stared at him. “We have been looking at this space before us all wrong. We have been trying to defend it, to keep them out, to make them pay for every part they capture. We expect to lose it eventually, and to retreat to Jahnd for a final defence. And then they'll have it. And it's a big space, well large enough for the Regent's entire army even befor
e he began to take casualties. We've thought of how he might hold it, and how he might manoeuvre within it.”

  “He'll ring us,” said Sasha, also leaning forward. “We'll be trapped in Jahnd. Koenyg will break through from the other side, we'll have to leave the valley or be overrun from two directions at once, and hide in Jahnd for protection.”

  “Because we'll have the stationary position and they'll be closing down on us. In daylight.”

  Sasha's breath caught. She opened her mouth to speak again, then closed it. And shot him a hard look.

  “No,” she said. “No, we couldn't manage that. It's too hard, combining serrin and human forces, and with the additional losses we'll have taken all through tomorrow…”

  “Not once we get back to Jahnd,” Kessligh said. “We'll have walls to defend us then, and the city outskirts.”

  “Which will begin to burn very fast once they line up their artillery on us.”

  “Which will take them time to arrange,” Kessligh countered. “We just need to survive until tomorrow night.”

  “Damn,” said Sasha. “That might not be easy. How would we force a hole in their line?”

  “There's no telling,” said Kessligh. “Some things cannot be preplanned. But I tell you now because I trust your mind, and I want you to think about it. If there is any chance at all of making it work, I'll need all the help you can give me.”

  The next day began well enough. In the east, Koenyg still did not attack. In the west, the Regent's forces moved their artillery close enough to the defensive wall that they could land volleys of hellfire upon it, and set it ablaze in many parts across its length. Kessligh had the Ilduuris and what was left of the Rhodaani Steel manning the wall, as they were better armoured for a static defence than the Lenays, yet when the hellfire began to strike, he pulled them off. The Regent's forces poured forward, but discovered their first mistake in using the catapults—a structure you'd just set ablaze was no easier to assault than it was to defend. Men could barely approach the burning sections, let alone lay their ladders and climb. Those who did climb the unburned sections were too isolated, and quickly cut down by archers and ballistas from the ground below.

  Soon the fires went out, and the Regent's forces retreated beneath heavy defensive artillery fire to regroup and try again. They tried rolling their artillery forward to gain range to shoot over the defensive wall and onto the lines of Steel and Lenay soldiers waiting behind, but Kessligh had thought of that, and his artillery returned fire with solid shot-balls of stone. Unlike hellfire, these hit and bounced with considerable momentum, and kept bouncing. Observers on the flanking hills reported several catapults struck by bouncing rounds, and one badly damaged. The Regent's men quickly withdrew their precious artillery back to a safer range.

  Observers counted twenty-three catapults and sixty-two ballistas, all wheel-mounted with separate ammunition wagons. Defensively, the Steels could muster twenty and fifty-six, respectively, in reply. It seemed an even match, until one considered the astonishing size of manpower that the Regent possessed to back it up. The Regent could absorb the casualties caused by artillery, and could exploit the havoc it wreaked in once orderly opposing formations. The defenders could not, on either count.

  Next, the Regent's forces began probing the hillsides above the wall in force. Those thrusts were met with Ilduuri men, far more skilled in battle on the high passes, and repelled. Small groups of the Regent's men had been scouting for trails across flanking mountains, Sasha's men reported to her. Each time they'd found a small group of Ilduuri, sometimes only three or four men, blocking a narrow pass by practised methods, and causing many casualties.

  At midmorning, the Regent's officers arrived at their best plan yet. They brought the catapults just close enough to fire over the defensive wall by only a short margin, braving return solid shot artillery to do so. The hellfire burst just beyond the wall, making great blasts of flame between the Steel lines and their wall, thus preventing infantry from rushing to man it as the next attack came roaring in. This had been thought of, however, with long trenches dug just behind the wall—protected from most hellfire save that which hit directly upon the wall's crest—and roofed in places with wood, tin, and tar to protect it from flames. Those men sheltering within were able to scramble up the wall quickly as they heard the attack coming in, many now armed with long pikes fashioned for the purpose.

  Others joined them, braving the shifting hellfire rounds for a dash through the kill-zone—the valley was wide, as was the wall, and even twenty-three catapults could only make sporadic fires along such a long line. Defensive artillery replied, and caused far greater carnage upon the clustered ranks of men-at-arms who attacked. Sasha rode along the line to be certain the defence was holding where the Dhemerhill River flowed beneath the wall, but that archway was defended first by great steel poles through the water, barely wide enough for a small man to squeeze between without armour, and tantalisingly trapping many who tried. A small group of archers trained serrin bows upon the gap, and feathered any who got stuck. It was far easier to take a ladder and climb over or go uphill and around.

  The noise was incredible. Acrid smoke from erupting hellfire singed the nostrils as outgoing artillery creaked and swung, and ballistas and archers released, and artillery crews yelled and wound and loaded their mechanisms. Tens of thousands of voices roared before the wall, as fighting broke out along its length, a clattering of steel that sounded like a wagon load of cutlery tumbling down a cliff. Archers braved the incoming hellfire killing zone to loose volleys blindly over the wall, while others sheltered more closely behind the wall, where incoming artillery would not fire for fear of killing their own men, stepping back just enough to fire almost straight up and over.

  The air was thick with outgoing artillery, ballistas, and arrows, fire erupting beyond the wall in concentrations sometimes so close, Sasha was almost pleased she could not see the result. Defenders upon the wall signalled with flags to artillery, indicating where they needed support most direly, and artillery men would struggle to manoeuvre oxen and great wheels, to push their contraptions into position to hit those targets.

  It could not last, Sasha knew—there were too many attackers. But they'd succeeded in doing the one thing they had to—bringing the attackers within the killing range of defensive artillery and holding them there for a long period of time. The carnage upon the far side of the wall must be horrific by now from hellfire alone. The Regent would have this wall, and eventually all this valley up to the walls of Jahnd, but he would pay an obscene price for them. And the defenders would move this artillery back as they retreated, and force the Regent to pay yet a higher price to breach the walls of Jahnd itself. With any luck, the plan was that he might have so few men left, they might recoil in horror and refuse to press home the final assault.

  What Sasha did not expect was to hear commotion from behind, and turn in her saddle to find that the eastern wall had broken with no warning at all, and tens of thousands of enemy cavalry were foaming across the valley toward her like a giant wave.

  “Retreat!” she yelled, and was horrified at how shrill her voice sounded. It sounded like fear. Which of course it was. “Trumpeter, full retreat, all ranks! Back to Jahnd, back to Jahnd!”

  But her force was spread wide across the wall, and some of them up the hills to either side of the valley. Cavalry moved fast, and charged into their rear. There was little hope of regrouping now, but she had to try, or all was lost.

  Then she saw Kessligh, riding out to the left bank of the Dhemerhill River, with a signalman to wave his flag and indicate a new line, a retreating line, with the river on the right flank and the left to face the oncoming infantry…thank the spirits for Kessligh, she thought with relief. They had to get as many of those on the northern end of the wall down and across to this southern bank as possible. The river protected them from the cavalry while the left flank could hold off the infantry as they pulled back toward the city.

  But th
ey had to save as much artillery as possible. Thankfully all of it was situated south of the river in fear of precisely this eventuality, and the need for a fast retreat to Jahnd. She galloped to the nearest artillery line, yelling and waving madly, as their crews looked about and stared.

  Errollyn was not entirely certain how it had happened. Only that one moment, Koenyg's forces had been engaged in a full-frontal assault against the Enoran Steel's formations, then somehow they pivoted and came in massive strength around the left flank, and straight about that end of the defensive wall. He suspected a trap, but he had been engaged upon the right flank and had not seen it happen. Sometimes in war it was all over so quickly, and now it hardly mattered.

  He raced back around the defensive wall, taking talmaad and Enorans with him in a headlong sprint. The Dhemerhill River was now between him and the main assault, and these were the lower reaches of Jahnd itself, crisscrossed with roads, little clusters of farms, houses, and industry, with temples and bridges as well. Open cavalry terrain it was not, and his force slowed to leap fences and cluster onto access roads. Errollyn quickly headed toward a bridge across the Dhemerhill, and the wider fields upon the far side.

  Here galloped a steady flood of horsemen of all descriptions—attacking Lenays, Kazeri, and Torovans, mixed in with talmaad from the left flank who were pursuing, weaving amidst the attackers and shooting them down, trying to slow their headlong charge into the rear of those who opposed the Regent's main force. They had to be slowed, or Jahnd was lost.

  He fitted an arrow, turned left across the galloping formation, and drew with his left hand across his body. It was his weaker side, but not by much. Several men closest had shields raised on their left side, so he selected a man further on and put an arrow through his neck. Around him, fellow talmaad did the same, arrows peppering shields and horses, some falling, riders behind swerving to dodge tumbling men and animals.