The Queen of Crows

by Myke Cole

  Xilyka laughed. “Do you honestly think that she will quit the walls?”

  Onas looked annoyed. “At least let us get you behind an embrasure.”

  Heloise tore her eyes from the arrow duel as Wolfun bellowed the order to shoot back. “All right, but make sure it’s somewhere everyone can see me. And I need to be able to see the fighting.”

  Onas led her to a wooden embrasure a good distance from the nearest pile of the fire-flower casks. Neither the sentries on the wall nor the attackers below were great marksmen, and for at least a quarter candle Heloise saw nothing more than shouting and dodging, archers ducking behind the battlements or racing to glean arrows.

  Then, suddenly, there was a meaty thunk beside her and one of the sentries sank to his knees, an arrow protruding from his open mouth. Below him, an enemy soldier sank to his knees as an arrow clanged loudly against his helmet, and one of the levy boys kicked on his side, an arrow sinking into his groin.

  “Guess we’ve found our range,” Wolfun mused, then tapped another one of the sentries on his shoulder. “Come off the wall, Cedric, you’re shot through.”

  The man, clean-shaven and gray haired, started as if waking from a long nap. He blinked at the arrow protruding from his arm. “By the Throne…” He sounded sleepy.

  “Just come off the wall,” Wolfun said, “and get a bandage around it. Then come right back. We can’t spare you.”

  Wolfun was right. The defenders looked so sparse, huge gaps between them. Below them, the enemy skirmishers seemed a boiling cauldron in comparison. For every arrow one of her own loosed, the enemy loosed five. Cedric was back in a moment, arm tied in a bandage, face pale. But he drew his bow all the same, hand shaking, arrow flying wide. He grit his teeth, drew, and aimed again.

  Heloise heard a creak like a forest groaning, as if the greatest cart in the world were rolling down a pitted track. She glanced up to see the wooden siege tower, as tall as the wall, rumbling forward. The levy were lined up like oxen before the tower, hauling away at ropes as thick as a man’s arm. As the tower cleared the line of tents, Heloise could see the army’s engineers running alongside, ladling fat onto the wheels from wooden buckets. Smoke rose from the wheels just the same. Soldiers were lined up behind the tower, pushing, their weapons strapped across their backs. They went back in rows past her vision, more behind this single tower than she had in her entire force.

  She gauged where the tower would reach the rampart and moved to intercept it, but stopped at a touch from Xilyka. “Not going to try to stop you,” the Hapti girl said, never taking her eyes from the rocking tower, “but you’ve got some time yet. No sense exposing yourself to arrows before you must.”

  Heloise heard a gasping cough and looked to her left, where Leahlabel had dragged the fallen sentry behind one of the watch towers. The arrow was gone from his mouth and his chest shuddered weakly, but he was alive. Leahlabel propped him up against the tower wall and turned to Giorgi, who was helping another sentry to her, an arrow sprouting from his chest. Leahlabel helped him onto his back and set her hands on him, eyes closed.

  The skirmishers were falling back, and Heloise could see troops of the uhlans lining up in columns, each with a wide shield in his left hand, and the rung of a long scaling ladder in his right. Their lances were looped across their backs by loose leather thongs. Short, curved swords hung at their waists. At the head of each column was an armored knight, curved wings arcing over his shoulders, jeweled sword in one hand, wing-shaped shield in the other.

  “Here they come,” Wolfun said. He turned to Giorgi. “Whatever tricks you’ve been saving, now would be the time to spring them.”

  Giorgi nodded to where Tillie crouched beside Leahlabel. The Mother barked an order and a row of knife-dancers streamed past her to crouch behind the wooden embrasures. Barnard appeared at Heloise’s side with Guntar, forge hammers ready. Samson had found a spear. Not the long pike of his levy days, but closer than any other weapon he’d held since the Knitting. They watched the tower trundle closer and closer, the men with the ladders keeping careful pace.

  At last, Heloise heard the sergeants bellow an order, and the enemy archers withdrew, falling back to the wings of the advancing troops. Heloise could see the Song astride his horse beside the black tent. It was impossible to tell with the gold mask across his face, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that he was smiling. There was no sign of Tone, but if she knew the Pilgrim at all, she didn’t doubt he was in the assaulting force somewhere. That was good. If she did nothing else in this battle, she could find and kill him at least.

  With each step, she waited for the sentries’ arrows to fall on the uhlans, to hear the plinking of sharp metal off the armor of the knights. Surely they were in range now? She turned to Wolfun and saw the sentries ducking down behind the battlements, their quivers all but empty. She felt the muscles in her thighs clenching, her body tensing.

  The tower paused and she heard a fainter creaking of great wooden wheels. She looked left and right, desperately seeking what had caused the noise. The ram! Where was the ram?!

  The Town Wall glanced to Giorgi, who shook his head, mouthing, Not yet.

  Wolfun cursed and turned to his men. “Loose what you have left. Pick your targets. Once you’re dry, go to rocks.” The men nodded and rose, shooting arrows at the ladder bearers. A few of them plinked off the armored knights, but others found their marks, sending levy or lighter armored soldiers screaming to their knees. It made no difference. There were too many men holding to too many rungs, and the loss of one, or two, or even three on a ladder didn’t so much as slow them. As they came nearer, the knife-casters rose, sending their flat blades flicking out into the approaching mass, men packed so closely it was difficult to miss. The knife blades were heavier, wider, and one of the knights was felled now, sitting down hard with a grunt, the knife handle still quivering in his knee.

  None of the casters even bothered to target the tower. The thick wooden beams would have been proof against any blade. The tower’s shadow fell across them now, a stretching column of black. Heloise strode out into it, shrugging off Onas’s efforts to hold her back. She let the cool shade wash over her, banged her knife-arm against her shield edge, eyes fixed on the tower’s ramp, waiting for it to drop. “Come on,” she whispered. “Come on.”

  “Not just yet, your eminence,” Wolfun said. “Might want to find some cover.”

  Heloise glanced at him, irritated at having her battle-focus interrupted, and noticed the Town Wall had a burning brand in one hand.

  “Heloise, come on!” her father called to her, and she reluctantly let Onas and Xilyka lead her back behind the battlement as Wolfun lit the first cask and kicked it hard, sending it over the wall’s edge.

  Heloise crouched, wincing, waiting for the boom that she’d always heard precede the glorious flash of color of a festival fire-flower. It never came. Perhaps the fire on the cask had gone out as it fell. Perhaps it had broken on the way down. Perhaps it simply did not work at all. Heloise hadn’t realized how much the prospect of the explosion had frightened her until she felt the muscles in her back unknot. At the festivals, she had always thrust her fingers in her ears to shut out the thunderous crack of explosions, but if the suit didn’t prevent her from doing it now, her missing hand certainly did.

  At last, she began to stand, “I don’t think it…”

  There was a faint splintering of wood from the base of the wall, followed by the whooshing rush of spreading flame. By the time she’d realized the boom that followed had sounded, her ears were already ringing, her eye watering. Had it not been for the machine’s weight, she might have fallen off the rampart.

  The screaming from below reached her, then, howls of agony. The tower stopped rolling, mere feet from the rampart, shouts of alarm sounding from the men behind it. Heloise leaned forward to look over the rampart’s edge.

  Below her, a wound had opened in the field of men. Two of the ladders were broken, splintered wood fragments st
ill smoking in the churned mud. Men were running, burning, crisping to the same slow shriveled black as Sigir, arms waving, howling out the last of their lives. Still others lay on the ground, bodies pocked with black holes smeared with red. Here and there was an arm, a leg, a jellied pool of gray that could only have been someone’s guts. The base of the wall was scarred black and burning, a long smear of thick blood splashed up it as high as a man was tall.

  A rain struck her then, a gentle patter against the machine’s metal frame. At first, it was the high chiming of bits of metal or stone, but that was soon replaced with the softer touch of what Heloise assumed was clods of earth, until the smell confirmed it was smoking meat. She shuddered, crouched again as Wolfun sent a second burning cask over the side, and a third. The wait didn’t seem so long now, and the thundering cracks barely made her wince.

  When she finally stood, the ladder teams had mostly scattered, with only two farther down the wall still holding together. They stood in stunned silence, gaping open-mouthed at the carnage. One of the knights was hobbling across the field, his shield burning brightly. As Heloise watched, he bent to retrieve a severed arm, still clad in blackened armor.

  Shouts from behind the tower, and Heloise saw the archers come surging to the fore again, not individual skirmishers this time, but rank upon rank of professional bowmen. They deployed in lines and fired by ranks, sending waves of arrows sheeting past the rampart. Heloise dropped along with the rest of the defenders, hearing the whooshing of the flights of arrows skimming just overhead. A moment later, she heard the creaking groan of the tower wheels again. Wolfun tried to raise his head, dropped back down as an arrow came whistling past. Another of his sentries was not so lucky, fell back to the rampart with an arrow in his eye. His comrade began dragging him toward Leahlabel, but the Sindi woman shook her head. “He’s gone.”

  “They’re making us keep our heads down long enough to get the tower in place,” Wolfun said. “Going to be sword work here soon.”

  The arrows kept flying as the tower’s shadow grew over them, the creaking of the wheels getting louder and louder. Heloise fought the urge to stand and risk herself in the storm of missiles. Surely the archers would stop shooting once the ramp lowered and the enemy spilled out? Heloise suddenly wasn’t so sure. The enemy could sustain the losses far better than her force could.

  At last the creaking stopped, and Heloise heard the gentle bump of the tower’s side touching the wall. Two soft plunks to her left told her that scaling ladders had been placed as well.

  The arrows stopped.

  And then, everything happened at once.

  Giorgi stood, shouting, sweeping his thick hands up toward the sky. The flames on the ground roared as if in answer, shooting upward until they topped the wall, spreading and blooming like flickering flowers. Men leapt from them, shimmering men of fire, like Heloise had seen outside the Sindi camp not so long ago. They threw themselves at the tower, their man-shapes suddenly going flat as they slipped between the cracks in the beams.

  The ramp from the tower fell, heavy wood thudding against the stone, smashing the wooden embrasure flat. The enemy came pouring out, but they were screaming, burning, throwing down their shields to beat at the fires behind their armor. A few of them flailed with swords or spears against the flame-men, the metal edges passing through the burning air with no effect at all.

  Into this press waded the knife-dancers, hooked blades whirling. They danced together, never speaking, but interleaving so seamlessly Heloise imagined they could read one another’s thoughts. The rampart was only wide enough to permit two to stand abreast, their spinning blades flashing past one another without clashing. As one dancer began panting, their shoulders drooping with the effort of keeping the knives moving, another would whirl into position, switching places in an elegant pattern that Heloise would have sworn had been rehearsed. In the face of such precision, the enemy’s superior numbers counted for nothing. The few who weren’t futilely attempting to fight the flame-men, or busy ripping off their burning surcoats, were driven stumbling back by the hooked knives. Some of the attackers fled back into the siege tower, others fanned out on the rampart farthest away from the knife-dancers. The rampart ended at the edge of one of the wall’s wooden watchtowers, and the soldiers began to pack up against it, driven back by the knife-dancers’ onslaught. When the space there was full, Heloise watched in horror as several of the soldiers chose to jump from the wall rather than risk the burning death in the tower, or the bladed death on the rampart.

  Heloise stared stupidly, the braced tension in her limbs curdling, sickening her now that she couldn’t act. She had been so ready to fight, only to find that she wasn’t needed. Xilyka and Onas stood between her and the combat, weapons ready, and Heloise knew they were far more concerned with preventing her from reaching the fighting than the fighting from reaching her.

  She heard her father grunt, and whirled to see him thrust his spear at the first of the enemy levy, clambering onto the rampart from the scaling ladders. The climber was waving a long meat cleaver, making desperate swipes at the spearhead, cowering at the ladder’s top. A butcher, then. Heloise could hear his comrades shouting at him to clear the ladder top. Her father thrust again, and the butcher batted the blow away, cringing back before his fellows shoved him forward and off the ladder. A part of Heloise wanted the poor man to survive. He was just a terrified villager shoved on into a battle, but she knew this frightened man would be just as keen to use his cleaver on her father if he thought it would spare him. For a moment, Heloise was frozen, torn between going to his aid and his destruction.

  In the end, her father made the decision for her, thrusting low through the butcher’s belly. Heloise saw the spear point burst through his back, and the butcher’s eyes went wide, his face shocked and hurt, as if to say, How could you? And then her father twisted the spear and yanked it out, and the butcher was collapsing, the man behind him surging over the rampart, stumbling over the butcher, falling on his face. Her father speared him, too, driving the point through the top of his bare head.

  Another stream of levy appeared at the top of a second ladder, rushing onto the rampart. Barnard advanced to meet them, knocking one man and then another from the wall with great sweeps of his hammer.

  Heloise now did her own comic dance, swinging left and then right, trying to aid the knife-dancers, then her father, and back again. Each time, Onas and Xilyka moved to block her, forcing her to choose between standing still or crushing them underfoot. “Move, damn you!” Heloise shouted.

  “They don’t need your help!” Onas shouted back. “We must keep you safe!”

  Heloise struggled with the rage building inside of her. There was fighting all around her, people dying for her, and her guard wouldn’t let her help.

  A shout rose from the postern gate. There were just two sentries in the towers there. Little boys left behind as lookouts as every available fighter scrambled to meet the attack unfolding on the western wall. The shout was followed by a booming crunch. “The ram!” Heloise could hear the voices drifting toward her.

  Another boom. She could see the postern watchtowers tremble, the top of the gate shuddering between them.

  The ram. They rolled it to the postern gate. That gate was shaking, and above it just two young boys, their screams coming higher and more hysterical. Beyond the gate she could see the dust plume kicked up by hundreds of marching feet, the enemy soldiers eagerly awaiting entrance into the town.

  The world seemed to slow, as if some wizardry had forced time to a crawl. Heloise turned, saw Onas and Xilyka turn with her, leaning their bodies to anticipate the direction of her movement and intervene, thinking to stop her from moving farther along the rampart in the direction of the postern gate.

  But Heloise wasn’t moving farther along the rampart. She squatted, the machine’s metal legs following suit, and when she pushed off, the tinker-engine leant its strength to a giant leap, sending her up and over her guards, her father and
Barnard at the scaling ladders, Leahlabel tending to the wounded, and Giorgi with his brow furrowed in concentration, egging his flame-men on. She heard Onas shouting her name as she flew down the inside of the wall, landed on the soft grass of the common, the machine absorbing some of the impact, but not enough to keep her teeth from clicking together.

  She ignored him, setting the machine to running toward where the postern gate was shuddering under the ram’s assault, each stride nearly as long as her leap, the gate growing in her vision. The iron bands were bulging now, and she could see some of the black-headed rivets popping free. One of the boys was sagging limp over the edge of the tower railing, an arrow projecting from his cheek. Hold on, Heloise projected the thought at the straining gate, as if she could will it to hold until she could arrive. Hold on. The gate splintered, one of the beams sagging inward like a gapped tooth.

  She could hear shouting, the light thudding of feet behind her, but she ignored it, her world shrinking to the gate and the towers above. Heloise reached the gate just as it shuddered, the locking bar groaning and cracking, and she squatted again, pushing the machine’s metal legs as hard as she could, jumping straight into the air.

  She knew it wasn’t enough the moment the machine’s feet left the ground. The tinker-engine was powerful, but the metal and leather around her was heavy, and the wall, while not enormous, was still high enough, and she would have to clear the watchtowers. The wood rushed past her, a gray-brown blur that slowed as the jump lost momentum, until at last the tower railing appeared with the boy’s corpse draped across it, and she could see the cracks in the boards. She could feel the ground beneath her grasping hungrily at the heavy machine. No.

  Heloise realized with a start that she’d shouted the word, reaching up with the corner of her shield and slamming it into the tower roof, pushing down with all her might. The thrust gave her what she needed to get over the top, and she felt the tower roof tripping her, sending the machine to its knees, skidding across its wooden shingles, tumbling off the other side.