Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath)

by Hambly, Barbara

  Gil shook her head. “Not a hope.”

  The leading ranks of the Alketch army came into view.

  It is no easy matter to count troops and estimate matériel through a hunk of ensorcelled ruby an inch and three-quarters long: scrying can tell a wizard where and if, but seldom how many. By the time Melantrys and Lank Yar, the Keep’s chief hunter, returned from reconnaissance with the news that the Alketch troops numbered nearly eleven hundred strong, the enemy was only hours from the Tall Gates. They were armed for siege, too, Melantrys said. Mules and oxen hauled two “turtles,” constructions of log and leather designed to protect soldiers while they undermined towers and walls.

  With a full muster of the Keep’s available warriors and all able-bodied adults to back them up, Janus estimated they could hold the Tall Gates for a time, but against trained men the cost would probably be terrible. “With all due respect to Mistress Hornbeam and Master Barrelstave,” he’d whispered to Minalde at the tense convocation that had followed Melantrys’ return, “one seasoned warrior properly armed can account for half a dozen volunteers.

  Leavin’ aside that we can’t afford to lose a soul here, their line’ll cave. And for what?”

  The commander of the Alketch troops was a stocky golden-skinned Delta Islander in an inlaid helmet bristling with spikes. He drew rein just where the road curved on its final approach to the Gates, and Gil could see the choke of men behind him, armored in bronze and steel and black-lacquered cane in the milky light of the overcast morning.

  Looking at the Tall Gates.

  “That’s it,” murmured Janus, a few feet along the makeshift wood rampart from where Gil stood. He wore full battle gear, something fewer than half the Guards possessed: black enameled breastplate and helm, rerebraces and pauldrons and gloves, unornamented save for the gold eagles of the House of Dare. “Think about it real good before you come on, me jolly boy. Surely there’s another party you can go to instead?”

  But Gil knew there wasn’t. With the slow-growing cold of the Summerless Year, even the settlements along the river valley had waned, dying out or succumbing to bandit troops. She had heard that the situation in the Felwoods was worse. The Keep of Dare in its high cold vale was the last organized center of civilization for many, many leagues, the last large, stable source of food production. Elsewhere was only banditry, White Raiders, and spreading chaos.

  There was no other party to go to.

  For the past seven years, the people of the Keep had been working on the watchtowers of the Tall Gates. They’d repaired the old stonework as well as they could without proper quarrying tools and raised palisades of sharpened tree trunks around the platforms on top. Bandit troops had burned the towers twice, but even before the disaster of the Summerless Year it had been hard to get draft animals to haul stone up from the river valley.

  Gil would have bet a dozen shirt-laces they would be in flames again within an hour, had she been able to find a taker.

  Between the towers another palisade stretched, a rough chevaux-de-friese of outward-pointing stakes, hastily cut and sharpened, fired hard, braced in the earth, and interwoven with all the brush that could be gathered to make the hedge thicker yet.

  Eleven hundred troops, thought Gil, her gloved fingers icy on the arrow-nock. They weren’t going to turn back.

  Battle drums echoed in the high rocks of the pass, ominous, palpable in the marrow of the bones. The golden commander edged his golden horse aside. The ranks parted—ebony soldiers from the Black Coast, ivory from the White, and the red-brown D’haalac borderlanders. Variegated banners lifted and curled in the morning wind.

  For some reason Gil remembered old Dr. Bannister of the UCLA history department, dry and fragile as a cast cicada skin, standing at the lecture-hall podium saying, “Henry II marched his armies against Philip Augustus …”

  Just that. Marched his armies. No wet boots and feet that ached with cold. No rush of adrenaline or hammering heart at the thought What if I die …?

  Marched his armies.

  The turtles lumbered eyelessly to the walls.

  They were sturdily built, Gil had to give them that. She couldn’t imagine how they’d gotten them across the Arrow River. She saw the overlapping hides black with water—they must weigh tons—and heard the squeak of the overburdened wheels. Arrows rained down from both gate towers, answered from slits in the walls and roofs. Gil wasn’t fooled. The men inside only waited for the real attack, the attempt by soldiers on foot to take the turtles.

  “Come on, Ilae,” whispered Melantrys, drawing, nocking, firing like a machine behind her tangle of beams and brush, “do your stuff.”

  The nearer turtle lurched and rocked a little, then came on. Gil guessed that Ilae’s spells of damage—broken axles, jammed wheels—wouldn’t have much effect. If Bektis could lay a weather-spell on the pass that would hold a storm there for almost forty-eight hours—and by the clouds still roiling over the Hammerking it was even yet going strong—his counterspells of ward on the turtles would be more than sufficient to thwart a novice like Ilae.

  Certainly when the men poured forth from them and began hacking and rending at the chevaux-de-frise between the towers, they showed no immediate signs of being affected by whatever panic and terror-spells the girl could muster. Rudy could probably have summoned better ones, but again, if Bektis had had sufficient time to manufacture wards and amulets against such spells, probably even Ingold couldn’t have done much.

  On the other hand, Ilae’s fire-spell transforming the entire barricade into a wall of flame worked just fine.

  Men scattered back, dropping their shields and falling under the steady downpour of arrows. Gil’s forearm stung where the bowstring smote the leather guard. Her fingers smarted, and smoke teared her eyes and made it hard to aim. More warriors pressed forward from the throat of the pass, armored and bearing big man-covering shields. Camp slaves, unarmored and dragging brush, came up behind them, piling the tinder around the walls of the watchtowers: “Right,” said Janus softly. “Time to be off, children. I guess they really, really want in.”

  There was no surprise in his voice, nor did Gil feel any. No commander would muster a force that large, or construct siege equipment, on a chance raid.

  A second volley of arrows burst from the trees on both sides of the pass as Lank Yar and his hunters responded to Janus’ signal to cover. Slaves fell, dying, innocent of the war that spilled their blood. Smoke rolled up the inside of the tower like a chimney as the archers streamed down the winding stair inside, Gil coughing, heat beating on her skin. This in some ways was the worst, and the only time when she felt in genuine danger. She slung her bow onto her back and joined the files of Guards—and of Ankres’ mixed troop of his own men, Lord Sketh’s, and the Church warriors who made up the archers on the south tower—in the fast march-run across the open Vale, to the Doors of the Keep.

  Dr. Bannister should see me now.

  If the turtles got through the burning barricade too fast and made a path for the horses, there was a chance that Janus’ retreating force could be ridden down and killed.

  But they weren’t. Gil didn’t dare look back, with men and women running on both sides of her, two and a half miles up the rising ground from the Tall Gates to the Keep on its knoll. On reaching the steps she turned, panting, troopers streaming past her and through the Doors, and saw the small Alketch cavalry galloping in futile pursuit. In the aspen groves that surrounded the towers Lank Yar’s hunters were still showering the attackers with missiles, bales of which had been hidden in the caves northwest of the Keep and in a hundred other caches, where the little corps of volunteers would be able to get to them in the sniping guerrilla campaign to come.

  Once the Doors were closed and the Alketch troops took the Vale, Lank Yar and his hunters would be on their own. They’d do a certain amount of damage, thought Gil, as the Guards and the white-clothed warriors of House Ankres filed past her, but they certainly wouldn’t drive the invaders away.
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br />   The fires around the towers were losing their first force. Smoke poured white into the sapphire sky, pierced now and again by flame, like many-colored silk thrashing in high wind. A few trees caught, as they generally did.

  “Are you having second thoughts?”

  Minalde stood at her side, white-faced and drawn. She held her daughter Gisa firmly by the hand, the dark-haired child looking about her with wonderment in her dark-blue eyes.

  Gil drew in her breath, and let it out. “No,” she said. “If it’s a choice between in or out …” She hooked her hands through her sword-sash. “You’re losing Wendie’s help inside as it is. If something goes wrong, I think I’ll be more use inside. I don’t think I’d make that much difference when the guys go over the pass to find Tir.”

  Alde looked away and nodded. Gil could feel her tension at the boy’s name.

  “Hey,” said Gil softly. “The Icefalcon will find him. He’ll bring him back.” Charles Lindbergh probably said the same thing to his wife. Of course, Charles Lindbergh didn’t have the Icefalcon looking for his vanished child, either. “How’s Rudy?”

  “Alive.” The gesture of Alde’s fingers tried to brush the topic aside, unbearable to the touch. There was silence before she could go on. “The same, Wend says. I … I suppose all we can do now is sit tight, as you say.”

  The last stragglers passed them, panting and joking among themselves, still high with the rush of escape. A hundred yards off the cavalry wheeled, helmet spikes flashing in the sun.

  Pale spring sun, thought Gil, bright on the thick new grass of the Vale. The translucent glister of glaciers, opal walls along the black cliffs, miles high; grizzled pines and quicksilver streams; the mirror flash of bogs and glabrous acres of slunch. A hawk turning, infinitely tiny against the sky. Morning light.

  She drained it deep, like her high school friend Sherry Reinhold going on one last binge before the diet that always started tomorrow …

  In or out. One choice, for who knew how long and under what circumstances?

  “Time to get inside, me Lady.” Janus pulled off his helmet, graying rufous hair hanging in sweaty strings in his eyes. Calculation in that pug face, and worry; the smell of his sweat and the armor’s leather straps. Once the Doors were shut—once the Alketch army was free to surround the black walls of the Keep—everyone’s options would be limited.

  From the twin columns of smoke under the eastern mountain wall dark worms of men crept out. Weapons caught soft flashes of sun, banners a faded echo of the wild-flower carpet they trampled. Scrying down the road Ilae had seen their supply lines—Prandhays Keep was far enough away, God knew, but not nearly so far as the South.

  The great Doors shut behind them, and Janus and Caldern turned the locking-rings. Hidden bolts and bars echoed, less a sound than a deep vibration in the glowstone shadows of the gate passage: Gil put her arm around Alde’s shoulders. The two women were the last to enter the Keep.

  The second set of Doors, thick metal wrought in ancient years, clanged, and all was sealed.

  “All over now; nothing more to see …” The Guards sounded petty against the hugeness of the Aisle, the loom of speculation and fear.

  Someone saw Minalde and set up a cheer that clattered among the high catwalks of the upper levels, the cavernous sable walls. After you’ve fought a battle in the morning, thought Gil, it’s difficult to just get out the laundry or do your gardening in the afternoon.

  (“Everyone in the village would come into the castle during the siege,” said Dr. Bannister, nervously chewing on the fat end of his tie.)

  The whole Aisle smelled of hay and the musty heaps of the tiny fodder-potatoes that for thousands of years had been this world’s only acquaintance with the spud family, until Rudy’s rediscovery of genuine potatoes—food-staple potatoes—two years ago. With that discovery the Keep had become completely self-sufficient. People still tilled corn and wheat outside, but that was for surplus and variety—lagniappe. With the cattle and sheep inside, they could hold out indefinitely. A couple of women were arguing about whose turn it was to shovel sheep dung. A man who hadn’t been in the battle was explaining to Lord Ankres how the attack could easily have been turned. Rishyu Hetakebnion, hair a shambles of sweat and smoke, was quietly throwing up in a corner.

  Minalde glanced back over her shoulder, at Melantrys and Janus setting the locking-rings of the inner set of Doors. “And now we wait,” she murmured. She rubbed her hand over her forehead—Gisa pulled on her other hand, wanting as usual to dart away into the doorways that led to the compounds where cattle and sheep were housed. “As soon as the storms clear, Yar will send men to help the Icefalcon …”

  “If he needs it.” Gil grinned, and Minalde was surprised into a wan answering smile. “It can’t possibly be more than a day or two, till they can start. Meanwhile Yar and his boys can give the guys outside a hard time. We’ll be okay.”

  “We’ll be okay.” She repeated the words as if forcing herself to believe and drew a long, shaky breath. “And in time, these people … What can they do? They can’t get in. They’ll strip the Vale of game, very soon I should think, and what then? Wait until winter? Until they get tired? Until Ingold arrives?”

  Gil folded her arms, looking around her at the heaps of fodder and provisions, twice head high and still dwarfed by the Aisle’s vastness. (“Provisions would be brought in from the surrounding countryside …”) Men and women were settling down around the little piles of glowstones, with bales and bundles of sticks and feathers and flint, to listen to storytellers while they made arrows, a wintertime occupation when there was no game or when a storm kept them in. At the Doors Ilae stood in a halo of witchlight, checking communication through her ruby with Brother Wend, outside with Lank Yar’s guerrillas. Janus and Lord Ankres went to her, asking—asking about the black river of men, of soldiers and slaves, of siege engines and provision wagons pooling before the Doors.

  The only way in or out.

  Impervious from the founding of the Keep.

  Gil wondered if she should keep silent. But she knew she had to say what she thought. It might just be true.

  “The problem is, Alde,” said Gil, “the warriors of the Alketch have to know that all they can do is sit outside till winter comes and they get buried in snow. They have to know that we have wizards here and would be able to see them coming, and get ourselves stocked up and locked down. So my questions is: Why doesn’t this bother them?”

  Alde sighed, her shoulders slumping a little, and her face was again the face of a young girl. “I wish you hadn’t asked that,” she said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “I expected to be killed, you see, o my sister,” said the Icefalcon, his voice no louder than the stirring of wind in the grass that curtained the rims of the maze of coulees through which they rode. “At the Moot, after Noon had gone up to the Haunted Mountain, I overheard Blue Child tell one of her friends, ‘I will see that you get Little Dancer and Sand Cat.’ I forget what favor he promised her in return. But I knew that she meant to kill me. Thus when Noon came down from the mountain and kissed me with the kiss of death, I was … suspicious. It fell, you understand, rather too pat.”

  It was good to ride again. Cold Death had three horses with her, of the short-coupled gray line of Evening Star Horse, bred by Frogs Singing and his family in the Pretty Water Country; they traveled sure-footedly and in silence through the red clay hills, the grasses of the bottomlands shoulder-high and prodigal with wildflowers. Loses His Way, though in the Icefalcon’s opinion not notably quick on the uptake, would at least be a more than competent guard for Tir.

  The Icefalcon’s mind turned uneasily from what he knew of Vair na-Chandros and the potential evils of Southron magic to what else might be waiting for him—for them all—here in the Real World.

  Cold Death listened without comment to the Icefalcon’s account of his life east of the mountains both before and after the coming of the Dark: of his meeting with Eldor, of Ingold, of the
Guards, and the Keep, and Tir. She listened, too, without comment as he revealed what Loses His Way had told him concerning the Wise One, Antlered Spider.

  “Noon raised me as much as you did, when Cattail and the Yellow Butterfly were killed.” He named their parents, as was the way among the Talking Stars People. “As much for what Blue Child did to me on that day, I owe her for what she did to him. His death was in his face when he came to me in the firelight.” He hesitated a moment. “When did he die?”

  “The following summer,” she said. “At the Place Where the Rocks Look Like Grapes. He grew too ill to keep up with the hunt and drank black hellebore, after giving his amulets and his horses to Blue Child.”

  The Icefalcon was silent, seeing again the old man as he stepped out of the night, hand outstretched, fingers shaking around the white shell, sorrow beyond sorrow in his sky-blue eyes.

  “The Stars told our Ancestors,” went on Cold Death quietly, “to send messengers to them at certain times. The bravest and the strongest, strong enough to pass through the Long Sacrifice without flinching or fleeing. They called you a coward.”

  “Blue Child did, I expect.” His voice turned hard.

  “They all did.”

  The Icefalcon said nothing, staring straight ahead past his horse’s ears to a rumpled wall of cottonwood, noting automatically the shape of limbs, the thickness or paucity of leaves.

  “How could Noon abide when the one he raised as his son refused to undertake the journey to the other world for his people’s sake?” She spoke reasonably, though he knew Cold Death had for all the years of adulthood absented herself from the Summer Moots, when the Long Sacrifice was made. “Without the messenger, our people would be at risk all the winter.”

  “Did disaster befall?”