by Lee Duigon
“Learned and beloved brothers,” he said, “we have not been able to confirm whether the ‘bell’ we all heard was indeed King Ozias’ bell on Bell Mountain. I have sent an expedition to investigate. Whether they’ll be able to get to Bell Mountain, with the whole country overrun by Heathen, is in God’s hands, not mine.
“Meanwhile, it remains for this synod to accept or reject the authenticity of this fascicle, as recommended by the authentication committee. Your vote on the matter will be final. As for those who dissent, as Prester Jod appears to do, they must follow the dictates of their own consciences: bearing in mind, of course, that if the synod accepts the verses, they must be preached in all the chamber houses in Obann. But they themselves shall be at liberty to resign their office, if they cannot bring themselves to abide by the decision of the synod.”
“That I can and will do, First Prester,” Jod said. “I shall resign from the synod and from my see with a good will, but I shall never resign from serving God.”
In the end, as expected, the synod accepted the verses, and Reesh accepted Jod’s resignation, along with several others. He kept all their names on file.
CHAPTER 21
The Assault on Ninneburky
In spite of himself, Helki now had a following of half a dozen men, young bucks with a burning desire to rid the forest of outlaws. He could have had quite a few more, but he only took the best. The others stayed at the castle. He would have preferred to have no one with him at all, but that wasn’t possible. If he didn’t lead these young men, they’d only get themselves in trouble.
They knew the location of each of Latt’s camps, the number and quality of men under him, and the paths by which they traveled through the forest. They also knew that Latt was receiving messengers from the Heathen army that was moving west. Helki’s band wanted to capture one of those messengers.
“Never mind that. It’ll only put them on their guard,” Helki said. “They think they own this part of the forest now, and I want them to go on thinking it.”
“But when are we going to do something?” Andrus cried. “I thought we were going to make war!”
“If you just chase a squirrel, boy, you’ll never catch it,” Helki said. “I aim to trap Squint-eye, not have a battle with him. Get rid of him, and his gang will fall apart.”
“Well, then, what are you going to do?” demanded one of the boys. “Walk into his camp one night and just bash in his head?”
Helki grinned. “Something like that!”
There was another Heathen army in Obann, besides the one Obst traveled with. This one came over the mountains in the north and swarmed down the north bank of the Imperial River. That area was poorly defended. Villages and logging camps went up in flames as the Heathen advanced.
These invaders were a people unfamiliar to the folk of Obann, a northern nation called the Zeph, who came from a country beside some great impenetrable swamps that was said to be somewhere “Out East.” No one from Obann had ever been there, in living memory.
The Zephites were fierce warriors who wore shaggy helmets with horns, which made them look like bulls on two legs. They went on foot almost as fast as other men could go on horseback. Those few refugees who had escaped them brought tales of terror: the Zeph were cruel, and gave no quarter.
This concerned the town of Ninneburky, which would surely be attacked, and soon. The Zeph were already on the north bank of the river, so evacuation to Oziah’s Wood was out of the question.
But the chief councilor, Ellayne’s father, was not thinking of evacuation.
Since that day the bell rang on Bell Mountain, Roshay Bault had ceased to fear for his daughter. “I can’t tell you how I know,” he would say, “but I know she’s alive and safe.” He knew it surely as he knew his own name; and Ellayne’s mother knew it, too.
Roshay bent himself single-mindedly to the task of defending his town. He worked the men as hard as they could bear it, strengthening the walls. He had a deep ditch dug around them, in which he planted upward-pointing wooden spikes to impale any attacker who fell in. He made sure every man in the militia had a bow and arrows, and they practiced archery as if their lives depended on it—which of course they did. Foragers scoured the country for supplies. Everybody knew the Zephites were coming, so they worked at a frantic pace, with Roshay personally inspecting everything.
He also placed the local prester under house arrest and installed Ashrof as acting prester in his place.
“Why did you do that?” asked his wife. “It was the Temple itself that ordered Ashrof expelled from the chamber house. It was his fault Ellayne ran off with the carter’s boy after Ashrof filled their heads with foolish stories.”
“Peace, Vannett. We heard the bell, so they weren’t foolish stories. Besides, the prester is a gloomy character, and I’ve heard he was planning to desert the town,” Roshay said. “But Ashrof is a man of God, and he’s the one we need in the chamber house now, praying for us. Would you rather have Ellayne here, with nothing but wooden walls and a few archers between her and the barbarians?”
Vannett nodded. Since the day the bell rang, she and her husband had lost the habit of arguing with each other.
Roshay wished he had the time and manpower to divert the river and make his town an island. But long before that work could have been completed, the Zephites came.
They knew from refugees that the Heathen host was near. Even so, it came as a shock to the man on the watchtower when he saw the teeming horde gathered on the riverbank. Roshay climbed up to see it for himself, and his heart sank.
“There’s an awful lot of them out there, sir,” said the watchman. “I think they might have more men than we have arrows.”
“I very much doubt we’ll have to kill them all,” Roshay answered.
There was nothing to do but man the defenses and watch while the Heathen crossed the river. They had no boats, but each man carried an inflated bladder of some kind to keep him afloat. They locked arms until they had human chains stretching from one bank to another, and along those chains crept the rest of the army until they were all on the south bank, facing Ninneburky. The crossing took up most of the day.
“Too bad we didn’t have enough men to hit ’em while they were doing it,” said a captain of the militia. “Look at ’em down there: they really do look like a herd of wild bulls. Think they’ll try a night attack?”
“Not unless they’re superhuman,” Roshay said. “They must be tired after that crossing. Keep an ordinary watch tonight, but let every man be at his post at first light.”
The next day was the worst day anyone in Ninneburky had ever seen.
When the first hint of dawn crept into the sky, masses of barbarians were already drawn up in a dense ring around the walls. Opposite the main gate, looking south, one man stepped out in front of the host and bellowed at the defenders in a language none of them had ever heard before. It was the mardar, but he was dressed as just another Zephite—helmet, horns, and a shaggy cloak. He raised a beribboned rod and shook it at the town, and those countless men behind him roared. And then they rushed forward, all of them at once.
“Hold your fire, boys—wait till you can make every arrow count!” The officers steadied their men as best they could, but many a hand trembled as its owner fitted arrow to the bow. The Zeph war cry sounded like an earthquake.
They had no ladders, no rams, no catapults. They must not have expected the moat. Some actually fell in, to be impaled on stakes. The rest tried to climb down and avoid the stakes, and then climb up again so they could get at the walls. But the air above them hummed with flying arrows, and there was such a crowd of them that an archer couldn’t miss.
It was very poor generalship on their part, Roshay thought. Nevertheless, for every Zephite that fell, two or three or four kept coming. They seemed to despise death. Heaps of killed and wounded lay in the ditch, but masses of men crawled out of it and attacked the walls with axes. Those who had no axes hurled short spears; and now men o
f Ninneburky began to drop off the wall.
The gate was the most vulnerable point. Had the Zeph taken time to shape a great log into a ram, they might have forced the gate in spite of the work done to strengthen it. Again and again they assaulted the gate, hacking at it, pushing against it fifty at a time with all their strength, while on the other side, crews of women pulled up heavy carts and pushed them onto their sides against the door.
And just when it seemed to everyone inside the walls that they’d done nothing all their lives but fight, and that they could fight no more, deep-voiced horns sounded somewhere and the Zephites abandoned the attack. They crawled over the bodies in the moat, back to their camp on the riverbank; and few were the arrows that pursued them. Only then did the defenders notice that the sun was setting.
“What’s our damage?” Roshay asked. It was nighttime now, and he and the captains were meeting at his home. He had never been more weary in his life, and his hands smarted with blisters raised and broken by his own bowstring.
“Half the men either dead or too badly hurt to fight tomorrow,” said the senior captain. “The walls are still pretty sound, but the moat’s too full of bodies to be a serious obstacle anymore.”
“And our arrow supply?”
“Looks like we’ll be fighting with spears and clubs tomorrow.”
No one said anything. What was there to say? That’s that, Roshay thought. Ninneburky had fought valiantly and defended itself with skill; but the defenders were too few, the attackers too many. Tomorrow would see the finish of it. My wife and my sons, Roshay thought—but didn’t care to finish that thought.
He heard a knock at his front door, heard Vannett go to answer it. She came into the parlor a moment later, with Ashrof.
“What’s the matter, prester?” Roshay had commandeered the chamber house to be used as a hospital: there must be a problem with the wounded, he thought.
“I came to tell you something, gentlemen,” Ashrof said. He looked just as exhausted as the younger men who’d fought all day.
“If it’s bad news, we don’t need any more,” said one of the captains. Another rose and offered his chair to the old man, but Ashrof waved it aside.
“Be of good cheer, all of you!” he said. “God will save our city.”
“What makes you say that?” Roshay said.
“I don’t know! I mean, I think I dozed off for a minute or two, and then suddenly I was wide-awake, and it was in my mind that God was going to save our city. It was as if I’d been praying, and God had answered my prayer. Only I was so busy with all those wounded men, I’m sure I had no time to pray.”
As Roshay searched for words with which to dismiss him gently, Vannett came back into the room with a mystified look on her face.
“It’s snowing,” she said.
It was not unheard-of for it to snow in Ninneburky, even this late in the spring; but it had never yet happened in Roshay’s lifetime. At Vannett’s urging, he and his captains trudged out to the back porch.
“Will you look at that!” said the senior captain.
The ground was already white, and the night bitterly cold. It was a hard snow, almost ice-pellets. You could hear it striking the porch roof.
“I can’t stay out here without my coat,” Vannett said. “Why, my teeth are chattering!”
Roshay looked Ashrof in the eye. “Well?” he said.
“Well what?” the old man answered. “Is this how God will save us? I don’t know.”
“It’ll take more than snow to drive away those fiends out there,” grumbled a captain.
And there was more than snow. At first it turned to ice and then, without the air getting the least bit warmer, freezing rain. Just to scramble across the street from one house to another, in that rain, was more than most could stand. It was the kind of rain that was colder than snow or ice, that froze you right down to the marrow in your bones. And the longer it went on, the harder it came down. Roshay and his captains could hardly hear each other speak, for the rattle of the rain on the roof.
Harder and harder, all night long, it rained, not so much water as liquid ice. Those who had fireplaces, and wood to burn, used them. The sentries on the walls had to be muffled up in coats and served hot drinks. They steadfastly stood their watch, but they couldn’t see anything. The enemy camp was hardly two bowshots from the town, but no one could see that far.
So it was that when the darkness of that long night had passed, and the new day dawned grey and miserable, and the surviving defenders of Ninneburky climbed wearily back to their posts on the walls, and finally it stopped raining, having filled the moat with water and enisled the town—only then could it be discovered that the Zeph had struck their camp and gone away.
Men stared until their eyes ached, but there was no enemy to be seen. Roshay sent out some scouts, who needed no skill to read the trodden, churned-up earth: the Heathen host had marched away to the south, leaving behind the corpses of wounded men who’d frozen to death in the night. In the little time it took the scouts to learn this, the sun came out, the air grew warm again, and vapor began to float up from the chilled and sodden earth, now rapidly thawing.
“Let the people gather in the chamber house,” Roshay told his captains, “and let songs of thanksgiving be sung: for God has saved us.” And to Ashrof, “Be prepared to lead the town in prayer.”
CHAPTER 22
Good News at Cardigal
From Caristun to Cardigal they made good time, Jack, Ellayne, and Martis, on the road that marched along the south bank of the river. But those who went down the Imperial on boats and barges made better, and they brought news—news that they shouted to anyone ashore who was close enough to hear them.
At first it was all bad news. A Heathen host had crossed the mountains north of the river and was driving west, destroying all in its path. “Men with bulls’ heads and horns!” was the wildest rumor.
Ellayne could hardly go on: she knew her hometown lay in the path of this army. While she was safe and free, her father and mother and brothers were likely to be killed by savages, and the whole town burned to the ground. It made her sick, and the sickness wouldn’t go away. She couldn’t help wondering, Is this how God repays me, after I’ve climbed the mountain and rung His cusset bell for Him?
But then, just before they reached Cardigal, the tenor of the news changed. Some men on a clumsy log raft were the first to tell the tale.
“The bulls’-heads have been beaten!” they cried. “They went up to Ninneburky and got their horns cut off!”
They didn’t get the full story until they stopped for the night, just outside of Cardigal, and a family in a boat came ashore to rest. They weren’t from Ninneburky, and Ellayne didn’t know them; but they’d stopped there briefly and had the tale from people in the town. Half a hundred refugees gathered around them to hear it.
“They couldn’t get over the wooden wall,” the man of the family said, “though quite a few of them died trying. And that night, out of nowhere, came an icy rain. It was too much for them! They struck camp and headed south to the plain, getting away from the weather.”
“And where are they now?” someone asked.
“Beats me—out on the plain somewhere,” the man said.
Ellayne couldn’t stand; she had to sit down. Martis carried her back to their own campfire. The night wasn’t especially cold, but she was shivering. Wytt crept inside her coat and cuddled up to her.
“Men with bulls’ heads,” Martis mused. “That’d be the Zeph, a northern people. It’s been hundreds of years since any of them came over the mountains. The whole East must be stirred up.”
“Maybe that’s how God’s going to end the world,” said Jack. But he was glad Ninneburky was saved, so far. “Maybe He means to set the whole world fighting.”
“Don’t be silly!” Ellayne said, through chattering teeth. “War can’t end the world.”
“Your father must have done a good job, though,” Jack said.
�
�He’s good at everything he does. That’s why he’s chief councilor. But it was snow and rain that drove off the Heathen, and God did that. I didn’t think He would, and now He has.” Ellayne was ashamed of herself for having thought God was ungrateful. A good theologian might have told her it was wrong to think of God as being in any way obligated to any mortal creature, but there was no theologian handy. All Ellayne could think was that God did care about her and her family, after all, and she’d been wrong to think He didn’t.
“There’s a bridge at Cardigal where we can cross to the north bank,” Martis said, “and it’s a good road from Cardigal to Obann, the best in the west. But I think we’d better stay on this south side of the river and enter the Old City without passing through the new. That road won’t be crowded, and we’ll make good time.”
“Is there a bridge between the old and new cities?” Jack asked.
“Only the ruins of a great bridge from ancient times—quite a sight to see. But there are no bridges, no ferries. No one crosses over to the ruins, except now and then a felon running from the hangman. Ordinary people wouldn’t go; they think the site is cursed. But it’s only ruins. I’ve been there myself, a few times.”
“Why did you go there?”
“Not for any purpose that’d give you a high opinion of me, Jack. The Old City is a good place for meetings and transactions that are best kept secret. I went over on my master’s business, which honest people might call crime.”
“Hard to think of the First Prester dirtying his hands with crime!” Ellayne said. “What kind of crime?”
“The worst kind—crime in the service of a good cause. I’d be ashamed to tell you about it,” Martis said.
“Never mind, then,” Jack said. “Will we be able to find this cellar that’s underneath a cellar?”
“We should be able to worm our way into any number of old cellars. I wonder if there are any Omah who might help us. I never saw or heard of any there.”