by Ted Neill
“Fall damn you,” Darid said under his breath.
As if in obedience to his wishes, the wood structure groaned and slipped. The remaining support beams exploded and wood chips, slivers, and ashes shot forth. The cobbled together benches, front doors, kitchen tables, and school desks collapsed on the waiting Maurvant. Flames roared loudly, growing hungrily with the rush of air. Cries came through the wooden doors. Pounding from the other side grew frantic then ceased all together.
Gail followed Darid, and the remaining soldiers followed her up the stairs to the original battlements. These were the walls the Karrithians knew well, where they had performed guard duty, cheered on parades, and watched royal ceremonies. The stone was too hot to touch with bare hands but the men beat on it with the pommels of their swords like war drums, their resolve returning. It only grew when they caught sight of the carnage below.
The burning wreckage had trapped the Maurvant raiders beneath it. The smell of immolated flesh was thick in the air and Gail’s eyes watered from the smoke billowing from the base of the castle wall. But she could not look away. There was a growing sense that something had turned. The Maurvant numbers had thinned. The spirits of chaos and confusion now took hold among them and the tribesmen ran about directionless, their ranks scattered, their order lost.
Then came the horn blast. It echoed through the streets of the upper city followed by the sound of drums . . . no, she heard wrong. Not drums but hoofbeats, horses, fast approaching their position. The men around her did an inventory of arrows, spears, and remaining weapons. They were much closer to the ground now on the original castle walls. Gail shared their feeling of vulnerability. She reached for her quiver. Only a few more arrows remained. She nocked one back with a sigh and a swallow.
She didn’t need it. The riders that turned the corner were clad in purple, blue, and green. At the fore on a white horse, his bloody sword raised, came King Talamar, his face fierce, his voice crying out a war cry heard over the sounds of horses, drums, and horns.
The main gate had held. The central thrust of the Maurvant attack, which she had nearly forgotten about, had been repelled by the Antans, by Talamar. He was the father of war, the bearer of death, and their shining hope for life. A great cheer rose up from the walls while the remaining Maurvant cried out in fear.
Talamar and his cavalry came down upon them like a storm. Steel flashed, blood flowed in the dirt, and men’s voices rose in anger and fright by turns.
“To their aid!” Darid ordered. The braces were dropped from the gates, the doors swung open, and the Karrithians rushed through the smoldering wreckage of the rampart, furies from the mouth of hell itself, to join their Antan brothers in the defense of their home.
The counterattack was over quickly. By the time Gail was outside the castle wall, the Maurvant were dead, dying, or surrendered. The threat was no more. Yet her blood lust was just beginning to boil and like the men who had just come down from the wall, she felt a surge of potency, ferocity, and yearned to swing blade into blade, steel into flesh. Talamar knew it and he harnessed it the only way a king could.
“Hear me brothers!” he cried out, turning his horse in place to look upon the men gathered around him. Gail felt as if his eyes fell directly on her. He addressed the army, yet reached each individual, herself included. He was their savior, their hope, their true king, and he was here to lead them to certain victory.
“Now is the time to strike back. Now is the time to save your city, your families, your children, your wives, your homes! Ride with me and we will finish this!”
Gail screamed until her voice broke then screamed some more. A rider-less horse, its owner injured or dead, galloped wildly past her. She seized its reins, swung her legs up into the saddle, and struck the flanks with her heels.
“Gail wait!” Daird said from behind her, slipping and using her real name.
“Come on,” she said, spit flying from her clenched teeth. “We have to ride with him.”
She barely waited long enough for Darid to mount another free horse, then she was off, following the flow of soldiers and riders back down through the city, after the king. She finally understood the power of royalty, of leadership, its ability to inspire hope and action. In her, all the more so, for she knew this man, this king, knew his vulnerabilities. He had been human before her, and so she was in awe of him all the more for it.
She kicked her horse harder. This was redemption. She cursed as her own brothers, Karrithian and Antan, blocked her way in a bottleneck of streets. Brothers, she thought. She never had felt such solidarity with her fellow Anthorians. She was reborn and like a child, she was impatient and knew no restraint. She pulled on her horse to the right, down a side street. She no longer worried whether or not Darid followed her. She was connected to something bigger now, a tide that carried her away into the final, decisive battle.
The side streets were not made for taking at a gallop. She did so anyway, her horse slipping on a few short corners and Gail ducking and narrowly avoiding striking her head on a number of balconies and hanging signs. Streets were still blocked with barricades, but already townspeople were pulling them down, making way for the growing counterattack from their own soldiers. Gail turned onto a street running through the disassembled buildings of the lower city. Citizens cheered from rooftops. Old women handed out fresh arrows. Gail snatched a bunch and jammed them into her own quiver.
King Talamar had just passed through the newly opened city gate. The other side was a nightmare of dead Maurvant bodies, pools of smoking oil, mixed with blood, so much blood. But better it be their enemies’ than their own. Across the no-man’s-land the Maurvant lines were reforming: ready to make another stand, this time not in siege but in an open field of combat. War chariots rolled up before phalanxes of foot soldiers, their battle flags still snapping in the air at the corner of their formations.
“Rally to me!” King Talamar cried out and the men of Karrith and Antas, brothers in the realm of Anthor, did so. The king waited for a spell, lining the men up in ad hoc companies, delaying as long as he dared to form some type of order without losing momentum. At some point, after some last rider joined at the rear, Talamar raised his sword, kicked his horse, and led them into the field.
They were a javelin hurled by a giant, or so Gail felt. She pushed her horse toward the front and center of the charge, keeping the king in her sight. The sense that nothing could stop them, righteous defenders of their homes, loyal followers of the king, compelled her forward like madness. She welcomed the clouds of dust from the enemy chariots, the nearing of a decisive end.
The forces met, the vanguards sweeping past one another with the ringing of steel and the thud of horses and bodies colliding. Men who rode too fast and let go of their spears too late were catapulted from their saddles into the air. A chariot overturned, its wheels spinning. Maurvant were rushing to reinforce their chariots, Anthorians to the aid of their combined cavalry.
Gail did not lack for targets to swing her sword at, but in the chaos and bumping and tumbling it was hard to tell if it was a Maurvant who crashed against her or a fellow Anthorian. A green clad Karrithian ranger drove two Maurvant foot soldiers towards her and she took her opportunity to behead one and stab the other deep in the neck.
“Good fighting brother,” the ranger said just before the bolt of a crossbow caught him in the head. His eyes rolled back and he tumbled off his horse. Gail moved to help him, but hearing the sharp clicking sound of more crossbows, she instead ducked low on her saddle—for one time in her life she was grateful for her small stature. It saved her, for she felt a bolt whip past her collar from behind before it lodged in her horse’s neck. He twisted beneath her, wild. She had no hope of controlling him. He tottered into a line of Maurvant spearmen and they rushed forward, impaling him further with their spears.
The horse lost, Gail rolled off his back, drew an arrow and had it nocked back before the horse hit the ground. She let fly and took one of the spearmen
out with a shot to the neck. Another close to her charged. She was not about to take him on, big as he was, so she turned and ran. Answering cavalry almost trampled her. She dodged an Antan rider who swept past and dispatched the pursuing spearman.
“Kevin,” she yelled out, recognizing her friend.
“Alex, quick get up!”
She leapt onto the hind quarters of his horse, gripped the beast as best she could with her thighs, and began to loose one arrow after another, providing Kevin cover as he rode deeper into the fight. The ground was awash with blood, the desolation and horror of the fresh battlefield. At the horses’ feet were the red and severed limbs and the colorful organs of disemboweled men. Mouths stretched in rictuses of pain. She watched two men struggling hand to hand, one biting the face of the other. Horses ran wild, their sides sliced open to expose rows of ribs.
“There!” Gail cried, hitting Kevin on the shoulder. “The king is there. Ride to—”
But her last words did not emerge. They caught in her throat, as did the voices of so many of the warriors, Maurvant and Anthorian alike, as a vision from fireside tales or nightmares stepped into view.
The creatures came from the Maurvant side: three beasts, four-legged, black with yellow eyes and blue-black nostrils on snouts that were cross-hatched with wolf-like fangs. They were not horses, not deer, but somehow Gail knew them to be elk, twisted, perverse, dark specimens, but elk nonetheless—some cousins of the one she had seen accompanying Derrick and Katlyn—for each one bore a sterling crown of metallic antlers, each branch ending in sharpened points. The monsters trampled Maurvant and Anthorian alike, but it was clear they moved towards the king, meeting his outriders and slaying their horses, opening their necks with gashes from their antlers, only to impale the riders themselves or toss them end-over-end into the air.
The Maurvant knew the beasts and fell in behind them, slaying the riders and foot soldiers they left wounded in their wake. Antan and Karrithian captains, civilians, regular infantry soldiers, all that was left of the Anthorian charge circled the king but their numbers soon dwindled as the beasts savaged them.
“Come on, we have to help,” Gail cried out. But Kevin’s horse spooked, catching whiff or sight of the foul creatures; then reared, and tossed them both. Gail landed on a dying man, his chest deflating with a groan, air bubbles bursting out of a bloody wound on his side. She drew an arrow and let fly at one of the beasts nearest the king. It struck a Maurvant, but not the elk.
She tripped forward over bodies, over broken weapons, while the ring of defenders around Talamar grew smaller and tighter. The king was unhorsed, dueling man-to-man with a Maurvant captain. Gail stopped, nocked another arrow, and dropped the Maurvant spearman who was rushing towards them. The king rounded a swing on the captain, struck him down, giving Gail cause to cheer. But it was short-lived. Talamar was alone and the three fell beasts were suddenly upon him.
“No!”
But her cries did nothing to stop the execution that took place. As one, the three beasts converged on the king, the crowns of spears punching through his armor, finding his flesh and digging deep. She watched as his sword slipped from his hand, clattered through the antlers of one of the monsters, then dropped to the ground.
She was so focused on the king that she did not see the Maurvant raider come up beside her until it was too late. He swung his mace into her shoulder and she crumpled, her side exploding with such pain that she was sure she was mortally wounded. She fell back, stared up at the sky, noticing the way buzzards were already circling and could do nothing but wait for the next blow to come.
It didn’t. Instead a sword flashed across her vision and lodged in the sternum of the Maurvant as he lifted his mace overhead. Darid appeared, drew his spare short-sword from his back, and finished off the Maurvant with a hack to the head, spinning him downward in a spray of blood.
It was from Darid’s shoulders, flung over them like a child, that Gail looked back to see the king fallen, Kevin, even her friend Patrick rushing to him as she fought Darid to let her go.
I should be there too, at his side.
Then came a cry to end them all. It spread like a bloody wound over them. Even the three beasts, withdrew, as if frightened by the note is struck. The voice was not of a dying man, yet it was pained as if all the weight of the world’s loss was bearing down on a single soul.
There was a clamor among the Maurvant. They were rushing to regroup. Fresh horns were blowing from the north; under a cloud of dust, another charge was coming. A new company had materialized, more Karrithian rangers, fresh to the fight, and at their lead—Gail had to blink to make sure—was a rider, an elk rider.
If her eyes did not deceive her, she realized it was Derrick, mounted on that same elk as before, as if her mind had conjured them from her own memory. The howl came from Derrick and no other. Spear shafts, helmets, swords came apart as he brought a gleaming blade down upon them. He was followed by a cavalry draped in Karrithian green: rangers. The elk rode up to the fallen king’s side. Even Darid now turned back, carrying Gail in his arms, the Maurvant falling back before the charging rangers.
The vision was true. It was Derrick and on horses about him rode the mercenaries, Val, Cody, and even others. They formed a defensive wall around the boy and the king. Gail watched in confusion. What claim had Derrick on the king? His hands trembled as he reached out and took Talamar’s.
Darid pushed through the gathering crowd. Gail slipped out of his arms and moved in close. Derrick did not notice her.
“Father,” he said, his eyes filming.
But if father saw son, it was not apparent. Talamar reached out for the face before him and said softly, “Airre’Soleigh.”
Then his hand dropped and Derrick was looking into a face that was blank.
“No, no, no—” she said, falling against Darid’s side, at which point the man named Cody caught sight of her.
“Red?”
But no more was said. A horn sounded. This one from the west, as the last rallied troops and citizens marched out from the direction of the city, crossing into the battle plain moving with precision, rank after rushing rank. The remaining cavalry joined by the new thundered past them into the Maurvant who had too few fighters left to reform their phalanxes. Flags waved in the arms of city dwellers running out into the field and climbing up upon the walls. More trumpets blaring. Wild drums were beating. The Maurvant lines were breaking.
In the center of it all, warriors had turned to mourners, for King Talamar was dead.
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