by Stephen Hunt
Carter’s family had just reached the gate’s shadow when his mother collided with a figure pushing the wrong way through the fleeing residents – a woman Carter recognised. It was Caroline Ormund. She always seemed to be bustling about town with more children than anyone else in Northhaven, a couple of them hanging on to her coattails right now.
‘Where in the name of the saints are you heading with your two youngest?’ demanded Mary, stopping the woman from heading down the hill. ‘You want to be putting some strong walls between you and these murdering devils in the air.’
‘It’s my boy, Felix,’ cried the woman. ‘He’s down at the school. His class started early for archery practice… some woodsman in town for the market going to teach them. I’ve just seen one of the girls from Felix’s class – she says all the adults are dead, half the children hiding in the classrooms under their desks. Sounds like chaos down there!’
Carter grimaced. The school was at the edge of the new town where the farmland began. Flat land leading out to the river road where those bandit gliders would surely be looking to land.
‘Damn that fool of a master,’ spat Mary. ‘Always angling to beat the Redwater Royal Free School at the thirty yards line. You’d think arrows in the gold were more important than making sure children get their letters and numbers. Call them in early for history and maths, no. But dangle an archery prize for our trophy cabinet…’
‘What am I going to do, Mary? He’s my little boy, what—’
‘You focus on your responsibilities to the rest of your family,’ said Mary firmly. ‘Keeping them alive.’ She looked at the two terrified girls hugging her leg. ‘You keep your head together for them. Because they need you, and you need your wits about you this day.’
‘There’s going to be bandits in town soon, ripping up houses for whatever’s not nailed down,’ Jacob told the woman. ‘You take those two little ones to shelter, Caroline. I’ll bring the children at the school back here.’
‘We’ll do it,’ said Mary. ‘It’s my school.’
‘We’ll bring little Felix back,’ promised Jacob.
Mary Carnehan’s eyes shone like two flints in a rockface. ‘We’ll bring them all back.’
Jacob turned to Carter. ‘Take the flier inside the walls.’
‘I’m—’
‘No arguing, boy. When you save a man’s life, his soul’s on you to care for. He’s not walking up the hill by himself. Take the flier to safety and tell Wiggins to hold the western gate open, you hear, keep it open until we get back.’
‘He’ll do it,’ said Mary. ‘Old Wiggins’ granddaughter is in the same class as Felix.’
‘But the raiders won’t be shooting at children?’ questioned Carter.
‘The bandits’ll want to put the fear in the town, keep the citizens bottled up and behind those walls and too scared to take offence at the looting outside. No better way to do that than a slaughter,’ said Jacob. ‘And youngsters don’t shoot back, which, for bandits, makes them the best target of all.’
Then Carter’s parents were gone. He was left with the weight of the semi-conscious pilot as well as the burden of his family’s slim chance of returning alive. As Carter hobbled forward with the stumbling Rodalian, it was hard to know which of them bore down greater. Well, you wanted your life livening up, Carter Carnehan. This lively enough for you, you idiot?
The school was in as bad a shape as Jacob had feared. Bombs had flattened the furthest of the four long buildings joined at the centre by a teachers’ block. Where the bandits had dived down, the classroom had been left a burning wreck. Children’s bodies lay scattered lifeless around the fenced-in fields, a couple of straw-filled archery circles stripped of their target cloth, overturned and smouldering from a strafing run, sods of grass torn where planes had passed overhead with their wing guns blazing.
Mary hissed in fury as she saw the corpses, her fingers bunching into a fist. ‘How could anyone do this?’
Jacob had nothing to say by way of explanation. Why does the sun come up each morning? Why does the rain fall and soak people? Why did bandits choose the life they did, preying on those weaker than themselves, rather than toiling in the soil and working with nature to provide a living? Why did hawks hunt hares rather than grazing the meadows beside their prey? Some things just were. Jacob scanned the skies from their hiding place, crouched in the vegetable patch of one of the homes bordering the school field. The aircrafts’ hornet buzzing sounded from behind them, raiders still driving townspeople up the hill as though this was a cattle drive.
‘I can see movement in those windows over there,’ said Jacob, trying to keep his wife focused on something other than her anger. It’s a fickle thing, anger. You can ride it like a log down a river. Sometimes it takes you where you want to go, other times it just dumps you down perilous rapids. Any angrier and Mary was likely to do something dangerous. Well, more hazardous than this morning’s business, anyhow.
Jacob and his wife jumped the fence and ran across the fields, keeping low. Adults lay mixed among the children’s corpses, the head of the school, another teacher and her young assistant – a boy barely older than Carter. The headmaster had a couple of nine-year-olds clutched under his bloody body. Jacob stopped, turning the man over to check the children for life. No good. Not with bandit fighters pumping out shells large enough to tear apart an enemy aircraft’s fuselage. The strafing run had ripped the schoolmaster apart and his body had proved as much of a shield as rice paper for the pupils he’d scooped up to sprint to cover with. Tears sprang into Jacob’s eyes. He could barely stand to look at the two youngsters, fear left frozen on their faces as they had died. This isn’t glory. This isn’t war. Just shortened lives with as little point behind their end as—
‘Come on,’ Mary urged. ‘I can hear crying inside.’
Jacob stepped through the wreckage of a blackened wall. Mary climbed behind him, kicking aside the building’s smouldering boards to gain access to the part of the school where they had seen heads bobbing through shattered glass. Two of the surviving classrooms were empty. Inside the third, they found desks overturned by the blast, whimpering heads quivering behind furniture. Frightened little faces stared out of a makeshift camp. An adult lay slumped against the wall under a window. A spreading pool of blood slicked out from his body where the left leg should have been, and Jacob saw where the archery target fabric had ended up. Ripped off and bandaged around the stump of limb which remained. Not one of the teachers, and from his size and workaday green jerkin, this was the woodsman who had come in for the market. He was still alive, just, his right hand clutching his bow as though it was a walking stick… a queer-looking contraption, a cam at the end of each limb supporting a sophisticated system of pulleys and cables. Jacob recognised the weapon for what it was. Haven’t seen one of those for a while. Mary raced to calm and gather the school children while Jacob ducked below sight of the shattered window to reach the man.
‘Didn’t see my leg outside, did you?’ growled the woodsman as Jacob bent down.
Jacob shook his head and checked the bandaged stump. ‘Reckon a wolf must have had it away, Mister…?’
‘Folks just call me Hamlet. You can take your choice of wolves out there. Sneak a peep out of the window behind me. Careful you’re not seen, man.’
Jacob lifted his head and glanced through the broken glass. Long lines of townspeople marched down the river road, their legs manacled together, just enough play to allow them to shuffle forward. Their captors were twisted. The bandits strutted a head taller than most of Northhaven’s men and women, green-scaled and lizard-snouted to boot. Twisted far beyond the common pattern. Short powerful tails swayed behind the raiders as they cursed and poked their prisoners forward with the business end of rifle-mounted bayonets. Before the Weylanders were chained in the cornfields, Jacob saw some locals being removed from the line, and he choked back his bile as he saw what happened next. Prisoners made to kneel, then one of the bandits – who must have been
large even for his nation – walked the line with a scimitar, decapitating the hostages from the start to the end of the queue.
‘It’s the old ’uns they’re murdering,’ said Hamlet, hearing the catch in Jacob’s throat. ‘And the ones too young to work.’
‘Not just bandits, then,’ said Jacob. ‘Slavers.’
Hamlet nodded. ‘Oh, they’re raiding the town’s corn ether too. You can see their transport planes landing near the wharves on the river. But out in those fields? Any Weylander over thirty-five isn’t worth the fuel it’d cost to fly them to the slave block. Wouldn’t survive long enough under the whip to fetch a good price. And anyone under ten years is too small to do a day’s hard labour.’
Off on the horizon, Jacob could see blimps hovering where the river ran. Skyhooks connected to grounded gliders, every craft filled with captured townspeople. Squat triplanes dipped down, all engines and wings, catching lines dangling from the balloons and pulling the gliders back into the sky, towing them up to the bandits’ monstrous carrier. Slavers. Jacob felt a dagger of fear jabbing in his side. How many people did Jacob know were chained inside one of those bandit gliders? Good people, terrified and bloody and cowed. His parishioners. His friends. Thank God I got Carter out.
Mary came over behind Jacob with a wooden pole. ‘You can tie this on as a splint. Got a longer piece of wood you can use as a crutch.’
Hamlet snorted in amusement. ‘Seen enough lumber come down the wrong way and crush a fellow to know this is only going to end one way for me.’
‘We’re not leaving you here,’ said Jacob.
‘Sure you are. Because those ugly twisted brutes have raiding parties tearing up houses for silver and anyone hiding in storm cellars, and they’re going to be rolling right through here any minute. Then you two lightweights are going to need a mighty powerful distraction to see these youngsters safely up to the town’s walls.’
‘What can we do for you, friend?’ asked Jacob.
Mary began to protest. ‘We’re not—’
Hamlet raised his hand, silencing any argument. ‘Wedge me up here on a chair and pass me my quiver. Come on now, be about it – I’m shy a leg, not my arms.’
Jacob heaved the woodsman’s body up onto a chair, feeling the tremors in the man’s chest. He’s right. Too much blood lost. Dead soon enough, even without the slavers helping him on his way. Hamlet’s life had narrowed to a single, slim path, that wasn’t leading anywhere a sensible man wanted to travel. Hamlet hefted his bow, a tight grip on it, laying it across his leg and stump. ‘This here is magic wood.’
‘I know what a compound bow is,’ said Jacob. ‘Though they’re rare enough around these parts.’
Hamlet pulled an arrow from his quiver, fitted the string around it, and locked the arrow back in one smooth motion. The weapon’s pulleys held the arrow taut without any extra effort on the woodsman’s part, ready to be loosed with a finger’s worth of pressure. ‘Bought it from a caravan that passed through town last summer. They told me it had been in their family for twenty generations. Think about that, travelling millions of miles, just to end up in my hands. End up here on this day. It’s almost a miracle.’
‘Maybe it is,’ said Jacob.
‘You see those children to safety up the hill and I’ll know it travelled true,’ coughed Hamlet. ‘Know it got here with a purpose.’
‘Trick bow like that,’ said Jacob, ‘Maybe I ought to cut your other leg off to make sure it’s a fair fight.’
Mary had the children lined up and ready to leave; fourteen of them, only half the class that had turned up early for competition practice. Some of them still had the school’s practice bows in their hands, clutching them tight like totems to protect against the fate that had befallen their friends and teachers.
‘We’ll head up Prospect Rise,’ said Mary. ‘That’s where the fires are worst. Bandits’ll leave that end of town last; those devils came here to start fires, not put them out.’
‘Sounds like a plan.’
One of the little girls peeled away from the line and offered her quiver to Hamlet, intent green eyes in her smoke-blackened face looking up at the dying woodsman. ‘Thank you for our archery lesson, Mister Hamlet.’
‘That’s a mighty kind gift, young lady. I’ll see if I can put some of those bolts where they need to be.’
Mary hustled the girl back into line, placing a finger against her lips. ‘We’re going up to the wall and playing silent rabbits all the way. Even if you see fires or other things on the way, you’ll be silent, won’t you? There’ll be a prize for the quietest when we get there.’
‘And there might be ugly lizard-faced strangers about who’re looking to trick you into making a noise,’ added Jacob. ‘But none of you are to fall for their pranks.’
‘You know the archer’s tradition,’ Hamlet said to Jacob before he left, ‘the final shot?’
Jacob nodded.
‘What’s that?’ Mary whispered as they ducked through the wrecked part of the school.
‘Something for later,’ said Jacob. And sweet saints, let there be a later for us.
They had slipped beyond the school fields, winding their way slowly, quietly up the hill, when a coughing snarl of rifle fire broke out behind them, short bursts of fire. Jacob couldn’t hear the twang of arrows being returned, but the angry discharge of guns told its own story. Sell yourself dear, woodsman.
Supported by Carter’s shoulder, the Rodalian pilot grew a little more coherent as they limped together through the Western gate. His face was a work of art, all right, and not just because he was Rodalian. His eyes were like a crow’s feet turned on their side, a line-apiece for eyebrow, eyes and the bags underneath, all three razor-thin. His hair might have been a twelve-year-old’s, as thick and bushy as any Carter had seen, and probably unnatural for a man who must’ve been in his late forties at least. Two prominent smile lines hung off a nose slightly too wide for the face, twitching above a clear white set of teeth that would’ve looked unnatural doing anything other than smiling. Even allowing for the man’s injuries, his movements were awkward and ungainly, like a mime pretending to be a pilot. The saints only knew how he had twisted and turned that flying wing of his with so much skill during his outnumbered duel above the town. Desperate refugees streamed all around Carter and his pilot, citizens grabbed by constables standing duty and pushed down the streets that branched out into the old town. Anything to hurry the townspeople along and keep the portcullis entrance unblocked.
‘What’s your name?’ murmured the pilot, using the back of his leather flying gloves to rub a streak of soot away from his cheek.
‘I’m Carter Carnehan.’
‘Where are your two friends, the ones who caught me after you cut my chute?’
‘My parents. They’re helping people down in the new town.’
The flier glanced towards the sky; the noise, but not the sight of the bandit raiders still rolling about up in the blue. ‘I have failed in my duty.’
‘You’re kidding me, right? Bandits must have sixty fighters in the air. You went right at them, flew into their squadron like the bravest fool I ever saw.’
‘The number of foes does not matter. You win or you do not win – one enemy or a hundred, no difference. If your soul is pure you will triumph. What chance now for the name of Sheplar Lesh to be entered in the skyguard’s rolls of honour after this defeat?’
Sheplar Lesh continued mumbling about losing his plane and his honour as Carter stumbled with the pilot towards an aid station set up in the lee of the wall. A gang of young men stood in the road, milling around uncertainly. Many of them faces that Carter recognised from his final year at school, others from the taverns and river when the ferries sailed up from Redwater bringing sailors who’d pay to be guided to good rooms and amiable company. It was obvious the mob wanted to do something. And it sure isn’t hunker down in some cellar and let the most interesting thing to happen in Northhaven for a couple of centuries pass on by while th
ey’re quaking in the dust next to old jam bottles and spare blankets. The men moved aside for Carter, a jabber of excited voices talking fast and breathless.
‘Heard they dive-bombed a crowd outside the Five Horseshoes and put thirty into the grave.’
‘No, that was along Blists Hill.’
‘Flattened the Pickerell house, killed Amy Pickerell and her little sister too.’
‘Bastards.’
‘Hey, is that the Rodalian—?’
Carter slipped past before the group could try and detain him. A makeshift surgery had been set up inside an ironmonger’s store, merchandise tables swept of goods and wounded constables stretched across the counters, burnt and gunned by the bandit planes wheeling through the sky, civilians too. Just townspeople out minding their business and looking to make an honest living when death had come screeching down on them. Damn the bandits to hell. Unexpected, uninvited and looking to steal what they had no right to.
Auxiliaries from the town’s hospital quickly stretched the Rodalian flier over one of the cleared tabletops, pulling away his flying jacket. Carter watched their practised hands at work. ‘You fix him up. This man’s the Rodalian who flew for us. He’s called Sheplar Lesh. One pilot against a whole bandit horde, that’s a name worth remembering.’
‘I’m not a head doctor,’ said the orderly, wiping bloody hands on his butcher’s apron. ‘But I’ll tend to everything except his madness.’
‘Can’t cure a man of being Rodalian,’ said the medic next to him. ‘You head up north and cross the mountain border; I hear they’re all like that.’
Carter ignored their mortuary humour. This flier had nearly died for them, a stranger in a flying wing honouring the ancient compact of the Lanca. Attack one, attack all. Well, now it was Carter’s turn. He was boiling as he pushed his way past the stretchers and blood and bandages and the stench of wounds soaked in pure alcohol. His temper wasn’t much improved by the sight of the high sheriff arguing with Constable Wiggins in the shadow of the keep. The squat leader of the town’s police was demanding that the portcullis be lowered; old Wiggins squared up to the officer as though he was planning to wrestle his commander to the ground.