The Lord Mayor spoke up. “I think your fyrdman has left his brain in the privy.”
“Indeed, it seems he shat it out.” At this comment from Walthin Dhoor the entire tavern erupted into laughter.
“Well, I suppose we could go and have a look at this latrine of yours, Barith. It isn’t quite dark yet.” The Lord Mayor observed.
“Why sure it is, Lord. Tis too late for the moon and too early for the dawn by hours.” Tessil replied, then he looked in wonder at the tavern’s window. An orange glow suffused the frosted glass, and as he looked it flickered. “Sparkly shit of angels, milord! ‘Tis fire!”
The steady roar of talk and music in the tavern died instantly at his words, and in the silence the town’s alarum bells could be heard clanging the five descending notes for fire.
“FIRE! We must go and fight it.” Shouted the Lord Mayor, and Tessil cursed while the fat bastard swept his winnings from the table. Out of curiosity, and knowing that he shouldn’t, he drew the next tile. Seven Hells. The five cups of course.
The three captains walked to the tavern’s door together and looked out. The Lord Mayor had already left, running while issuing commands. “Look there.” Ajin said, pointing. “Roofs are burning.”
“And there.” Pointed Dhoor. “And there also.” Tessil could see the three roofs they were pointing to, widely spaced houses near the western wall, and a fourth further on. As he watched, a flaming arrow arched into the sky, bounced off of a roof and fell into the street. He ran and picked it up.
“It has Aulig fletching.” He told the other captains. “We’d better see to the men.”
“Aye.” Ajin replied. “A damned raiding party. Fancy them having the balls to come this close to town.”
“The horse left today to go chasing raiders up north.” Dhoor said. “We don’t have hardly no horse to chase them down.”
“We might still be able to catch some of them with footmen if we hurry.”
The three of them trotted toward the north gate, which was close by. To their left they saw the roof of another house catching fire, and a man lay dead in the street, a white-fletched Aulig arrow sticking from the collar of his shirt.
Not one of them uttered aloud what was becoming apparent. This was no mere raid, and their men were all without the city walls, with nothing but the thin canvas of their tents to protect them from archers.
“We are going to need some of our men to help with the fires.” Dhoor observed. “Or this town will go up like tinder.”
They reached the north gate of the town and discovered that the four gate guards were all dead, hanging over the sides of the wooden palisade and pincushioned with arrows, no less than half a dozen each. When Ajin climbed the tower to look over the mercenary camp, a hail of arrows greeted him, and one stuck in his cloak as he leapt down, cursing.
Panicked cries from the other side of the gate reached them. “Open the gate!” Shouted a clear Mortentian voice. It took both Tessil and Dhoor’s strength to lift the bar, and the gate surged open, forced by the desperate men pressing their bodies against it. Fifteen or twenty mercenaries scrambled through the opening, several of them carried Aulig arrows in shoulder, hip or thigh.
“The camp is lost, Lord!” One panicked Fire Eater shouted, and a stream of wounded mercenaries followed him through the gates and into the burning town.
Tessil Barith looked through the gate’s opening at a scene of madness. Tents were burning as far as his eyes could see, and the orderly lines of the camp had disintegrated. A thick column of mercenaries and soldiers in the livery of Mortentia and the mercenary bands ran pell-mell toward the open gates, harried by a veritable storm of arrows. Even as he watched, half a dozen men fell. Men who had been hit by fire arrows rolled on the ground screaming or lay dead and burning.
One group of a dozen Fire Eaters was running under the cover of their shields, and two of them were carrying the band’s war chest. This seemed to catch the attention of the Auligs, and the leaders of the group stumbled as arrows found their legs. The men behind them tripped, the shield formation fell apart and in moments the focused archery of the Auligs either killed or crippled all of them, not thirty paces from the gate.
“I need a shield wall! Half a gilder for any man who helps me get that chest!” Dhoor roared at the retreating men, but they ignored him. Dhoor looked at Barith hopefully.
“Not me.” He said. “You can’t spend it in Hell. I’ve my own men to see to.” He turned then and began running toward the town’s south gate, several hundred paces away and out of sight behind burning buildings. Fully half of the town seemed to be in flames. Dead and wounded men, women and children lay in the street, for now the Auligs were firing volleys at the town generally. The arrows fell like stinging rain.
Barith stopped to grab a concave rectangular shield from the body of a dead man and held it over his head as he ran. He prayed to the Angel of War that fool Brenn was right and the privy was a fortress, because this town was surely lost. “To me, Red Tigers!” He shouted, picking up a mob of followers on his way. Maybe half a dozen of them were Red Tigers, but the rest were either townsmen or a motley collection of mercenaries who had managed to survive the destruction of the northern camps.
He rounded a bend in Walcox’ central street and the south gate lay a hundred paces before him. It looked miraculously untouched, as did the houses around it. The gate was closed and the gate guards were still at their posts, although they were crouched behind the palisade to avoid presenting targets to the Aulig bowmen. Half of them were looking through arrow slits to the fields south of town and half of them seemed to be gazing at the fires within it.
Barith approached the gates at the head of his mob. “What goes on here?” He demanded. “Who is in charge?”
“Me, sir.” A young man who looked barely old enough to shave answered him from one of the towers. “I am Undersquadman Vitrun.”
“We need this gate open, Vitrun.” Barith told him. “The north gate is lost and the city is burning. We need to get these people to the forest.”
“Can’t sir.” Vitrun replied. “There’s archers out there. They’re shooting anyone tries to get through the gates. But someone’s shooting them, too.”
“What of the Red Tiger camp?” Barith demanded.
“We heard some shouting over there earlier, sir, but it has been quiet since.” Barith climbed the steps to the platform beside the man and chanced a look through the arrow slit. In the glow from the burning town he could see his own wagons strung out in two lines maybe a hundred and fifty paces from the wall, with perhaps fifteen or twenty archers planted between them, facing outward. While he watched, an Aulig, his face foolishly painted white, stood up from the tall grass maybe two hundred paces to the west and shot an arrow at the men behind the wagons. The arrow stuck harmlessly in the side of one of the wagons and an answering arrow took the Aulig in the chest.
Someone had piled loose timbers up around the wheels of the wagons, and they formed a neat barricade. Arrows stuck out from the wagons in all directions, but his men seemed largely unhurt. In direct line from the gate through the corridor formed by the wagons Barith could see a dim shape rising from the open field beyond, a shape that could only be his latrine. It was long and narrow, with the narrow side facing the gate, a continuation of the corridor that led into the woods.
“Vitrun, the town is on fire behind us.” Barith explained. “We need to get these people to the forest, and the only way that isn’t surrounded by Aulig archers goes through this gate, between those wagons and into the Red Tiger camp. If we can get into the forest we can get these people on the king’s road, and they can be miles away by morning.”
“I don’t have permission to open it, sir.” Vitrun replied nervously.
“You have my permission, son.” Barith replied. “And if you don’t open it and let these people through, they’re going to pull your men down and open it themselves, understand?” The young man nodded unhappily.
Ba
rith turned to the mob before the gates. He saw that many of them were mercenaries or soldiers, and of these fully half still carried their shields. “We are going to need a shield wall.” He began. “If you have a shield, form up on the outside ranks, left and right. When we open the gates you need to stay to the outside while everyone else stays in the middle. You folks in the middle, if you have anything you can put over your heads, do it. We are going to make a run for a small fort that’s out in the field, then from there into the forest.”
“There’s no fornicating fort.” One of Arker’s Hammers replied. “That’s sheepshit. I been in this town a month and there’s no fort south of town.”
“There is now.” Barith replied. “The Red Tigers built it. Remember that.” As he replied he gave thought to Aelfric O’Brownton. It would take a fool not to see the brilliance behind the arrangement of the wagons and the construction of the fortified latrine. That damned Blackhill rat had saved his band and now the Red Tigers were going to save half the town. How in seven hells had Aelfric foreseen the attack? It had to be that Aulig scout the godsknights had, that Exkarial or some such. Barith had seen them in conversation.
Not that it mattered. If they survived this night, the Red Tigers would get credit for saving Walcox, which meant that Tessil Barith would get the credit. He smiled to himself. He would have to make Aelfric a fyrdman. He knew which fyrdman he was going to replace, too. That fornicating drunk Brenn.
“Take nothing more than the food you can carry and your weapons!” Barith yelled at the crowd. “We run for our lives this night. Do not stop until you reach the forest. Stay between the shield walls and do not stop if your neighbor falls.”
When the gate opened Barith saw that it was a long hundred and fifty paces to the cover of the wagons. The best cover was a crowd, though, and Barith had his. He remembered his father’s old saying, ‘you don’t have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the bastard next to you.’ He moved to the middle of the group, lifted his shield high above his head and started walking fast. Like an armored turtle the mass of men moved forward, and Aulig arrows fell among them.
Behind the wagons the archers saw the white-faced Auligs rise from the grass to shoot at the men coming from the gate, and they took time to aim. There were only twenty archers here, but they had a wide field of fire and an enemy who was both unarmored and stupid enough to wear white face paint at night. Auligs died left and right, many of them pierced by arrows their own women had fletched and the Mortentians had scavenged.
The bowmen from the Red Tiger archer fyrdes came from Colcart and Topwater and a score of towns just like them, where every man could shoot a longbow and real gold was awarded by the king for the winners of archery contests. They had an open field of fire and their enemies presented easy targets, so nearly every arrow found its mark. But the Aulig bowmen were good, too, for to them the bow was meat and gold, food on the table and furs and horn to sell, and they were here to extinguish the fire that was Mortentia and win their final war. They stood to shoot at the marching men, and although many died upon standing, many lived to crouch, stand and shoot again. The mass of people moving from the gate to the wagons was a target they scarcely needed to aim to hit.
It took the men from town nearly two minutes to reach the cover of the wagons, and they left fifteen dead along the way. Despite Barith’s admonition to run all the way to the forest, the men stopped between the wagons and raised their shields above their heads. “Who is the Fyrdman here?” Barith demanded.
“It’s me.” Replied Oldo Frittick from his place next to a food wagon. The bowman had an Aulig arrow nocked in his longbow, and he didn’t turn from watching for Auligs as he spoke. Barith turned to him.
“Whose idea was it to put these wagons here?”
“The Privy Lord, sir. That Aelfric of the Blackhill Gang.” Barith nodded.
“Good man, that Aelfric. But we’ll need more bowmen here.” He turned to the men who had come from the town. “Who here can shoot?” A dozen hands went up. Bows were lifted from beneath a tarp on one of the wagons and passed around. “Good. Kill every one of those bastards you see.”
Barith could see the fortified privy about a hundred paces to the south, and he called out. “Hello the fort! We’re coming over!”
“Come on then!” Aelfric replied. “We will cover you!”
Once again the shield wall moved. As Barith drew closer to it he laughed inwardly. Latrine indeed. Aelfric had managed to build in a day a small fort any hill chief from western Zoric would have been proud of. With low walls and a sunken interior and lashed together beams on the top, it was a fortress that couldn’t be taken by any number of archers, not if any armed men were in it at all.
Yes, that fool Brenn was finished as a Fyrdman in his band. Warin Bribiker was only half useful, but Brenn’s place would belong to Aelfric O’Brownton. Imagine the man’s stupidity to come into the tavern and tell the Lord Mayor to his face that the Red Tigers were building a fortification on his land without permission.
Thanks be to the Angel of War he hadn’t let the Lord Mayor see this fort going up, or there would have been seven devils to pay over it.
He stood a bit taller to get a better look at the design of the fortification and the iron-tipped arrow punctured the side of his neck. With horror he saw the snowy white fletching only a few inches from his right eye.
That meant that over half of the arrow was through his neck, which meant …
Suddenly he was flat on his back, staring at the men marching over him. He needed to get back up before the shield wall passed him by, or he would be without cover here. He needed to …
Ardur Brenn had become sober during the last hour, and he saw Barith fall in the middle of the cluster of men making their way toward the latrine fortress. Despite that one’s instruction not to stop for the fallen, he took the time to crouch down over the body. He cut the strap holding the coin purse and stuffed it into his pants beneath his tunic. It was likely a month’s pay for three hundred and fifty men in gold, he figured, making him a fairly rich man.
Three hundred and eight men had been in the Red Tiger camp when the attack began. Plainly the Auligs didn’t think the latrine was anything other than a fort, for it was subject to a storm of arrows that, if it did not blacken the sky, at least made it certain death to stick your head out and gaze at the stars.
Eighteen Red Tigers died in the first volley, and thirty two more during the mad scramble that followed the first flight of arrows. Every man who had scoffed at the ‘first class latrine’ quickly realized it was the only cover within a hundred paces and was now either huddled beneath its protection or dead attempting to reach it.
Now two hundred men crouched on the floor of the latrine, and fifty more or so knelt at the arrow slits, looking for targets. The fires on the rooftops of Walcox gave them light to see by. Men who weren’t shooting recovered arrows for those who were, and each archer had no less than twenty standing beside his place on the wall. Most of these were Aulig arrows.
“They paint their faces white.” Ymbert Charkoler said with detachment. Although he was a merely average swordsman, it turned out he could shoot nearly as well as the men from the archer fyrdes. “They make good targets when they stand up to shoot.”
“Clear the north end!” Aelfric ordered. “We’ve got our first group coming in. Archers, cover them.” Despite the fact that there were several other men there who were, in fact, fyrdmen, Aelfric had become the de facto commander of what they were calling the privy fortress. He had foreseen the need for it and he had overseen its construction, and every man there knew he would be dead had they not built it.
In a few moments a collection of men staggered into the privy from the direction of the town, falling gratefully to the dirt floor and gasping with exertion. They left half a dozen dead behind them. Aelfric turned to them. “All right, any of you who can shoot a bow, you get to stay. The rest of you catch your breath. In a few minutes we’re going to cover yo
u while you make a run for the forest.”
“What, and leave this here fortification?” Demanded a mercenary with the striped pants, white checked tabard and high glossy boots of the Blackboots.
“That’s right.” Aelfric replied, loosening his tabard. Despite the coolness of the evening, he’d been sweating furiously since the attack began. “We don’t have room for many more than we have here, and every man in town is going to be coming through here on their way to the woods or they’re going to die.”
“Bollocks.” Said a man in a Red Tiger uniform, and Aelfric recognized the fyrdman who had complained about him building this fortification earlier. “I’m a fyrdman, Aelfric, and you don’t command here. We’ll take as many in as we can.”
Haim grabbed his spear and stepped beside Aelfric, as did Masci Barliman and Ymbert Charkoler. They had their hands on their swordhilts. “Aelfric the Privy Lord commands here.” Haim explained. “We built it and we own it. All of the fyrdmen here agreed to that until Barith comes back.”
“Barith ain’t coming back.” Brenn said spitefully. “He’s dead. Took an arrow to the throat. He give me the command when he died.” For proof he pulled the purse from beneath his tunic as he spoke, revealing Tessil Barith’s mark on the leather bag.
“Is that so?” Haim exclaimed rudely. “He gave you the command? And him with an arrow in his throat? I think you likely cut his throat and took his purse.”
“No, it was an arrow all right.” Spoke Blackboots. “I saw him catch it, not fifty paces from here. He was leading us out of Walcox. But he surely didn’t have no time to be giving over his command.”
“No, he didn’t.” Aelfric observed coldly. “Nor would he cut his purse strap to hand over the gold. Fyrdman Cansel, take charge of that purse.” Several of the Blackhill Gang stood around Brenn while the big fyrdman from the Tenth Spear Fyrde relieved Brenn of the purse.
War of the Misread Augury: Book One of the Black Griffin Rising Trilogy Page 44