by R J Barker
His heart beating.
His breath rasping.
The air in his ears whispering.
The blood in his veins hissing.
Behind all this the ever-changing melody of the windspire, that strange, sad chorus, and it felt to Joron that the organs of his body had become part of it, that his body’s struggle through the arteries of the island was a counterpoint to the melody of the spire far above. And though he did not know why, that song helped him. Had it not been with him, he was sure he would have been overwhelmed by the darkness. He was a man of the sea, and the weight of the island above him would have broken his mind, or worse, entombed him. But the song was like a guide: it pulled him on, cleared his mind of worry.
Then he felt less weight, more space.
The air around him was no longer cold and close but wider and moving.
The wanelights gilded his little group with golden highlights – hints of body, leg and head, breast and chest. Narza stood, then Namd, then Farys and Old Briaret, then Karring, then him. They were in a cave, a true cave, almost high enough for them to stand up. Two passages led from it. No one spoke – not, Joron thought, because they were afraid of being heard, but because this dark place did not invite speech.
Then he heard voices from somewhere ahead. Narza cocked her head, and the way the wanelight haloed her hair changed. She pointed to the seaward tunnel. Touched a finger to her lips. They followed her silently down the passage, the voices becoming louder, light growing before them.
Two people, two men.
They stood with their backs to the passage, a rope dangling in front of them. Joron could smell clean, fresh water.
Narza glanced over her shoulder – did he see her black eyes? Were they lighter in the dark? – and motioned to them to stay where they were. Then she simply walked towards the two men, not attempting to hide or to slow or to mask her footsteps. If anything she speeded up as she approached. Joron had seen many fights, many deaths – nothing was as common as violence in the Hundred Isles – but he had never seen anything like Narza. Never seen anyone who committed so fully, as if they knew no fear.
By the time she reached the men, Narza was running. She threw herself at the back of one, knocking him to the ground with her shoulder and using his bulk to stop her forward motion. As the other man turned towards her, surprised, shocked, uncomprehending, Narza’s bone knife slashed across his throat. He staggered back, never having drawn his curnow or made a sound, vainly trying to halt the flow of blood from his neck. Narza, still moving, let herself fall. It was a lazy movement. The man she had knocked down was pushing himself up. She fell on to him, elbow angled to dig in just below his ribs. Joron heard the air as it was knocked from his body by her weight. She rolled off him and came to her knees in one movement, then drove the bone dagger down into the man’s skull.
It took her more effort to remove the blade from the man’s head than it had for her to kill them, and Joron wondered if he found her more frightening than the journey through the caves.
Narza sheathed her knives. Far above in the roof of the cave was a circle of light – the cellar of the tower. The rope fell from it into a small spring surrounded by a woven wall of dried varisk vines. She grabbed the rope, pulled a bucket from the spring and took a long drink. Then threw it back into the well before yanking away the wall of vines and pulling on the rope until it was taut. Then she looked at Joron.
“Well,” he said, “the arakeesian comes, and the longer we wait the more danger Meas will be in. Best we go up quick. And, Narza, best you go first.” He pointed towards the two corpses. “It seems you are well suited for such work.”
Did she smile then? Maybe, fleetingly, before she took hold of the rope, swung on to it, waving her leg to give herself a little swing which she used to to twist the rope around her thigh. Then she started to climb. Not wanting to appear cowardly, though he could not be unaware of the quick beat of his heart at the thought of the tower full of raiders above them, Joron grabbed the rope and did the same. Farys followed him with Karring, Old Briaret and Namd behind.
Up they went towards the circle of light in the ceiling. It looked very far away, but it also grew very quickly. Nearing the top, Narza freed her leg from the rope and climbed the last few lengths using just her hands, one of her bone knives clutched between her teeth. Joron took his cue from her and pulled his own knife, biting down on it and thanking the Hag as he had been sure his teeth were about to start chattering from fear. He glanced down – so far to fall. Farys, below him, also held a knife in her mouth. Her eyes gleamed, and the meagre light gave her burned face an inhuman look.
Narza vanished over the rim of the hole and Joron paused. Heard no sounds coming from above, though that did not mean there was no one there. Narza had proved how silently she could kill. Then he was at the hole, pulling himself up more slowly than Narza, keeping one leg entwined in the rope in case he should slip. Swinging himself from the rope to the lip of the floor, pulling himself over.
A cellar just as Coughlin had said. No one here. Boxes of food lined the walls. Joron could smell the slightly rank smell of dried fish that the damp had got into. Farys appeared, then Namd, Old Briaret and Karring. There was no door to the room; only a ladder which led up to a trapdoor.
“Narza,” he said and pointed at the trapdoor. Now he felt his fear differently: no longer paralysing, instead it filled him with energy.
What had been terror at what was to come was subsumed by an inevitability that had not been there in the caves. There was no going back now. He could have found excuses up until this point. Not now. They were committed. Now they would fight and die or fight and live.
“Are you ready, my girls and boys?” he said.
They nodded, and he was amazed that they seemed to feel no fear, though maybe they did. Maybe they wondered that he felt no fear for his voice did not waver, and his mouth was bent into a grin that he did not understand, that he knew was a mask.
“Then we will show no mercy. We have no friends in the tower above us. We have only one task, to open the doors and keep them open.” Narza was already at the trapdoor. “Kanvey is up there,” he said quietly, but making sure he was heard. “He betrayed us, rowed away at Corfynhulme and left us to die. Threw a spear at the shipwife. Let us show him what happens to those who betray Tide Child, ey?”
A chorus of “Eys” and he was on the ladder behind Narza. Ready. Scared. Breath coming quickly.
“Open it,” he said. “Open it now.”
And she did.
Narza’s feet vanished above Joron. He followed closely. Where the tower basement had been full of the same damp as the caves, above the air was close and hot, trapped within the tower, mud bricks baking under the scrutiny of Skearith’s Eye and turning the room into an oven. It was not a particularly big room, maybe twenty paces to each wall. To seaward was a staircase, to landward the doors. Joron barely had time to count the people in it – not many, ten, maybe? – before they were fighting.
Narza had fallen on them, her bone knives out, rising and falling, her teeth bared. She killed in utter silence. A group of raiders were standing at a table, shocked, apparently unable to understand where this sudden terror had come from. Joron pulled the curnow from the hook on his belt, fumbled the movement Meas had tried to teach him – Don’t give yourself time to think – ran at them, bringing the blade down on the woman nearest him. It cut into her collarbone. She slumped to the floor, staring at Joron as if to ask, “Why did you do this to me?”
Then he was fighting. There was no great skill to it – there was not with a curnow. He slashed about himself with it as the remaining raiders drew their weapons.
Out of the corner of his eye Joron saw Farys raise her club.
“Farys!” he shouted. “Ignore them! Get the doors open!” She ran for the doors as a man came at Joron. He held a hammer, but before he could bring it down Old Briaret was at him, her short wyrmpike in his guts, and the man’s scream of fury turned to
one of agony. Behind the man was another, who lunged at Old Briaret with a rusty curnow. Karring slapped the blow away with his hand, letting Old Briaret’s spear dart out again, rupturing another gut and sending another body to the floor, where it curled around its own pain.
“It is open!” shouted Farys.
A sharp pain in Joron’s shoulder. He swung round, bringing his curnow with him, and it bit into the side of the man who had just cut him with a knife. It was not a killing blow, so Narza finished him, thrusting one of her knives into his ear.
“Back!” shouted Joron. “We must hold the door.” Five raiders remained but they were wary, hanging back while one shouted up the stairs for help. “Namd, with me!” shouted Joron. “The table!” The two ran forward. Three defenders ran to meet them, but two shied away when the one in the lead was felled by a hammer thrown by Karring. Joron and Namd grabbed the table. Dragging it over to the doors when more women and men came streaming down the stairs. Among them was Kanvey. Much larger than the rest, he swayed rather than walked down the stairs.
“Bows!” Kanvey shouted. “Get some bows and bring them down! And anyone that comes through the door behind them!”
Joron glanced behind him, looking out through the doorway. Against the colourful riot of the forest he could see Meas leading her crew in a sprint across the clearing, dodging from side to side to avoid the arrows coming from the top of the tower.
“We need the bows up top,” shouted a voice from above.
“Nay,” Kanvey shouted back as Joron and Namd wrestled the heavy varisk table up in front of them like a shield. “They’ll get in now, but so we must kill them down here.” For the first time Kanvey looked at the women and men crouched before the open door to the tower. “Joron Twiner,” he said. He seemed in good spirits. “Well, I confess I did not expect to see you again, and definitely not still wearing the onetail.” Raiders with bows began to take positions on the stairs around Kanvey. “Try not to kill Twiner,” he said. “He has a dainty turn of leg. I would have some fun with him.”
The first arrows came in. A hail of them, biting into the table. Namd let out a yelp and swore: “Hag’s tits.” An arrow had passed through the flesh of his bicep. Without word or pause Narza leaned forward, grabbed the shaft of the arrow in both hands and snapped the feathered end off. Before Namd could even cry out, she had pulled the arrow out. Namd let out a low, angry moan, bent over and lost in his own pain for a moment, then he straightened as much as he could in the shelter of the table.
“I’ll pay some stonebound back for that, I will.”
Joron heard bodies hit the door and Meas poked her head through the doorway, low down. Another round of arrows bit into the table.
“Good of you to arrange a little shelter, Deckkeeper.”
“Ey, but how we get from here to those stairs I do not know.”
“Well we must; the keyshan approaches. Give me a moment.” Her head vanished and then reappeared. “I do believe I gave you a couple of crossbows?”
He stared at her for a second, then felt his eyes widen.
“Ey, you did.”
He pulled at the crossbows attached to his jacket as Meas passed through another with some bolts and a couple of bows with arrows. “See if you can make them duck so we can get in without taking an arrow,” she said.
Joron primed his crossbows and after the next volley of arrows looked over the edge of the table, searching in vain for Kanvey, but he must have retreated from danger and joined the rest of his women and men further up the tower, so he loosed his bolt at the scrum on the stairs. He did not hit anyone, nor did he expect to, but from the shouts the bolt provoked it was clear their adversaries had not expected anyone to shoot back.
“Bring oil!” went up the shout from the raiders. “Bring oil! We’ll burn them out.”
“That’s not good, D’keeper,” said Farys. For the first time he heard an edge of panic in her voice. “I do not want to burn again.”
“You will not,” said Joron with more authority than he felt. And he would do all he could to stop that happening. “Meas will have us up those stairs before they get the chance.”
Meas’s head appeared again.
“Make way,” she said. “Get ready with your bows. Coughlin and Anzir are coming through. Namd, be ready. We will move quickly, and they will need your strength. When I shut this door, loose at the stairs.”
Before Joron could ask what was planned, Meas vanished and the door shut. Joron stood and shot his crossbows, and at the same time Farys, Old Briaret and Namd stood and loosed arrows. They had no time to aim, and those on the stairs were in little danger, but the volley made them duck. At the same time Coughlin and Anzir slipped through the door and crawled to each end of the table.
“Grab the middle of the table, Namd,” said Coughlin. He wriggled his upper body to get the shield on his back into a more comfortable position. “When I say go, we lift the table and go forward. Ready?”
“Forward?” said Joron.
“Ey!” said Anzir “We must take the tower or lose the keyshan, and Meas will not have that.” Then Namd and Joron realised what they were about: they intended to use the table as a movable shield to attack the stairs.
“Be ready,” Joron said quietly to Farys, Briaret and Karring. “When they move forward it should surprise those on the stairs enough for us to get in an aimed shot.” His heart beat so hard inside his chest he though it would explode. “Make that shot count.”
Coughlin glanced across at Anzir and Namd, gave them a nod.
“Go,” he shouted loudly enough to be heard by Meas on the other side of the door. “For the keyshan!” With a grunt they lifted the heavy table and ran forward.
Joron stayed where he was, along with Farys, Karring and Old Briaret. He saw the faces of the raiders on the stairs stretch into surprise. They looked like hard women and men used to fighting. Joron extended his arm, picked a target. Took a second to make sure his man was lined up. His target drew back on his bow. Joron loosed his bolt, aiming at an eye, taking the man in the chest. As he shot he saw two women struggling down the stairs with a pot of oil. Beside him he saw Farys alter her aim and loose her arrow at one of the women, hitting her in the neck. She fell, the oil spilling from the pot onto the stairs and all those below her.
Through the doorway streamed the rest of Tide Child’s crew, screaming at the tops of their voices and brandishing their weapons. Those with bows loosed at the defenders on the stairs. Arrows came back. Two of Coughlin’s men fell, and one of Tide Child’s crew dropped with an arrow in her forehead. The rest ran on, screaming.
The raiders’ arrows stopped as those covered in oil realised what soaked their clothes. Oil dripped down the stairs, pooling at the bottom. At the top of the stairs a women with a burning torch appeared. A defender glanced up, realised why she was there and with a shout of “No!” made a grab for the torch. The woman, either unaware or not caring why the man wished to stop her, tried to brush him off. The two struggled. She tried to draw her knife; the man grabbed her hand, and his foot slipped on the oil-covered stairs. Both fell, tumbling among their slick and glistening fellows, and with a great bark of air being consumed the crowd of raiders went up in a screaming inferno.
“Back!” shouted Meas, though she had no need to worry about her crew as Coughlin, Anzir and the rest were retreating rapidly. The women and men who had been defending the stairs screamed as they burned. The air filled with the smell of singing hair and roasting flesh. “Use your bows!” shouted Meas. “I’ll not have them suffer.” Arrows flew, and soon there were none left alive on the stairs, but the flames still burned and the stink of charring flesh filled the room. “Open both doors,” said Meas. “That is lamp oil. It burns fierce and quick, and I would have it burn itself out. But it will steal the air from a room as it does. I’ll not have Kanvey come down to find us passed out and easy pickings; we have a job to do here.” The doors were thrown open, and the flames leaped up but found nothing more to bu
rn than already blackened bodies, and soon there was only smoke and stink in the room.
When the smoke had cleared Meas called her crew together. “Joron,” she said, “choose a few to guard the doors in case anyone hides in the forest and tries to come at our rear.” With that she started up the stairs, stepping over charred corpses. “Come, my girls and boys! Up the tower and there’ll be a fair few less of them to meet us. Come on.” She lifted her sword. “For the keyshan!” And the crew of Tide Child echoed her, shouting “For the keyshan!” as they trampled bodies beneath their feet.
In the sudden quiet, he heard sobbing.
Farys had retreated to a corner of the room and was curled up on herself, as if she could hide from the world.
“It is the fire,” said Old Briaret. “She still remembers when it tried to take her. She cannot forget.” Joron knelt down by her. Farys was lost but he understood why. That same fear which overtook her lived within him every time he thought of his body, of its weakness and of the things that could be done to it.
“Farys,” he said softly. She looked up, her eyes red, clear mucus running from her nose. Was it shame that crossed her scarred face?
He did not know what to do.
“I am sorry, Deckkeeper. I hid.” Words creeping out through her tears. “’Tis the cord for cowardice, or death, I know that.”
“I see no coward, Farys. The shipwife needs me up in the tower, but I must leave some here to guard, so that would be you, Namd, Karring and Old Briaret.” Farys stared at him. “I will leave you in charge.”