A Sword for a Dragon (37 page)

The Committee of Emergency Action met once more in Commander Glaves’s quarters on Fatan Street amid an atmosphere of anxiety and gloom.

The committee had swollen in numbers in the past couple of hours. Surgeon Tubtiel of the Kadein First Regiment, First Legion, the fabled “One and Ones” had appeared and then Commander Uzpy, also of the One and Ones, showed up. The sight of the row of completed siege towers, dozens of them, had concentrated people’s minds quite wonderfully. General Pekel himself had finally sent a representative, a young half-captain named Dashute.

Through these hours, Glaves reveled in the thrill as his salon became the center of a whirl of intrigues, with news, rumors, and scraps of rumor, being borne in by the Kadeini officers, who hung around the fringes of the action.

But all such excitements come to an end, and this one ended dismally with the return of Euxus of Fozad. After Euxus had spoken, Porteous Glaves felt as if all the color of the world had been drained away, all that was left was clay.

Euxus of Fozad had given them the bad news. The enemy would attack the next day at noon. If they were going to offer anything to the enemy, they would have to offer it now. They would have to do it that very night.

Essentially it meant that they would have to mutiny. They would have to seize General Paxion and put him under guard. Just possibly they might have to kill him.

It was too much to ask.

“Old Pax is always accompanied by a security guard now, at least twenty men from the Marneri legion,” said Commander Vinblat sadly.

“I can’t expect my men to follow me in an open mutiny,” muttered Commander Uzpy. “They’re not ready for that. It’s too soon.”

“Why must we act so soon? Why don’t we wait?”

Glaves, too, wondered why they might not wait. What difference would a few hours make? But Euxus of Fozad was adamant. His contacts with the enemy said that the attack would go on immediately unless the city was surrendered.

“Perhaps you might seize a gate and open it tonight. That would be accepted favorably by the leaders of the Sephisti.”

The Kadeini were aghast.

“Open treachery! Is that what you want? Replacing old Pax with General Pekel is one thing, but opening the gates to the enemy is another,” boomed the archer from Kenor, Captain Ferahr.

“I will never betray my men,” snapped Commander Vinblat. “I am a man of honor first and foremost.”

Euxus snorted nervously. Fools! “What ailed you? Can you not see that this is your only hope. Your only chance of escape?”

“Count me out!” barked another commander.

“Nor will I stoop to common treachery,” said Surgeon Tubtiel with a hiss of indignation.

Glaves’s jaw had dropped open. This was unimaginable. He’d got them this far, and now that they had a possible way out and they wouldn’t take it. Euxus of Fozad’s face, normally so smoothly impassive, now betrayed a degree of irritability.

Desperately Glaves threw himself into the fray. Something could be worked out. Surely another day or two would make no difference.

Euxus of Fozad could not agree. It was not up to him; it was what he had been told. The enemy believed that it would take the walls. It had overwhelming force. A vast army, stiffened with the terrible blood myrmidons, was waiting for the signal to begin the assault. The enemy felt that the committee had not done enough to earn serious consideration. They must open a gate or prepare to die with the rest.

Alas, the Kadeini could not agree to that, and they departed in an angry mood. In the salon they left a wide-eyed Glaves, who dug around desperately in a cupboard for the remnants of a bottle of whiskey. Empties, they were all empties! There was nothing to be found.

However, Euxus of Fozad had not given up completely. He nodded at Glaves and produced a slim silver flask.

“Perhaps you would care for some of my own personal distillate?”

Glaves snatched at it and swallowed three gulps of the black drink. It was like nothing he’d ever tasted before, spicy, alcoholic, and fiery indeed.

In a few moments, his eyes bulged in his head as the black drink took effect. Euxus smiled benignly and then suggested that Glaves could save the situation himself. All he had to do was order his own troops to open the Fatan Gate.

Porteous Glaves lurched up and was about to shout his agreement, but the black drink checked his tongue. One of the disarming capacities of the black drink was that it would spur the tongue of the uninitiated to unusually scrupulous truthfulness.

For a moment, Porteous Glaves struggled. He had a vision of himself leading his men to open the gates, but he knew that it was a fraud and within seconds it dissolved to ashes. He could not lie.

“My men would not obey such a command. I cannot do it.”

“Surely you are too modest? You are the commander, after all.”

“My officers would not relay such orders.”

“Are you not a popular commander, much loved by his troops?”

Glaves gave a big sigh and seemed to collapse back into his seat.

“My troops hate me, they’re ugly and ungrateful…”

“Ah, so.” Euxus of Fozad had feared as much. “Well, in that case, my poor fellow, it’s up to you. Perhaps you can figure out some way to open the Fatan Gate tonight. If the army of Sephis held even one gate, then the entire defense would be utterly compromised. The loss of life would be far less than it will be if the attack is launched. And, of course, if you opened the gate and lead your men out to surrender, then you would be well rewarded.”

For a second, Porteous Glaves stared up at the man and then he began to giggle. The giggles rose in tiers to violent laughter and continued into a near-hysteric fit. He was red-faced, manic, when Euxus left the house and scurried away into the shadows.

Eventually the laughter descended into sobs and shuddering deep breaths. With tears rolling down his cheeks, Porteous Glaves stood in the window and looked out across the doomed city. It was very dark, hardly any lamp oil remained. The temple pyramids were picked out by the moon’s light. He had no hope left at all. Alone he could do nothing. Even Dandrax was of limited utility and would refuse suicidal orders. The gate was heavily guarded, the men would not be taken unawares. It was impossible, it seemed that he was going to die here in this wretched foreign hellhole and that he would never get back to punish Ruwat for suggesting this mad scheme of joining the army to gain political preferment. Tears of rage formed in his eyes, and slowly trickled down his cheeks and dripped off his chin.

The day dawned bright and clear, a few fluffy white clouds scudded across the sky in the early morning and a cool breeze blew down from the north.

At the Fatan Gate, the cooks boiled up a mash of porridge and everyone ate well; men and boys from their bowls, dragons from their tubs. There were the usual complaints about the lack of flavor, of akh, of variety in general, but at least everyone’s stomach was filled. When they finished, they took up their positions and waited.

On the wall, they watched impassively. Everyone knew what was coming this day. Relkin worked on his dragons, with assistance from Hatlin, who had formed a certain bond with the great Purple Green.

Hatlin worked on the Purple Green’s blisters and bruises leaving Relkin free to deal with Bazil. Bazil had a sore spot, on his right shoulder, where he’d been struck by a mud man’s hammer in the fight in the mine. From Relkin’s knapwood box had come the old standby, Sugustus’s Liniment and Scale Tonic for the adult dragon.

The leatherback had been moving his arms around, stretching his muscles, but he paused for the liniment to be applied.

“That shoulder still sore,” he grunted.

“Should have rested it more.”

“How to rest it when we train all day with the poles?”

A good question and one for which Relkin had no answer. The poles in question were laid out on the wall, ready for the dragons to wield. The engineers had calculated that four dragons, pushing on one side of a siege tower could topple it with poles at least forty feet in length. A row of tall conifers in the Imperial City had at once been selected, trimmed, and removed by the Argonathi engineers much to the horror of the gardeners. Dragons had trained with the poles ever since.

“All day yesterday, they ask dragons to pretend to push with those poles. We hate the poles.”

“Hold still, I want to get this well under the scales.”

The dragon grumbled but stilled its vast bulk. Relkin spread the liniment across the massive shoulder region with the palm of his hand. The muscles underneath the thick leatherback-skin scales felt tight, hardened by the constant work and exercise of the siege. With so little beer in the diet and so much exercise, the dragons had all lost a little weight and were, in fact, reaching peak form and strength, although Relkin was worried about the lack of fresh foods and akh. Dragons needed the good things in akh to remain healthy.

Of course, all this hardening of muscle and increased fitness had come at the expense of their good humor and even of their morale. With the food as boring as it was, the great beasts had to have something to look forward to in each day, and in Ourdh that had become the excellent beer.

The Purple Green was the last to get up onto the walls. Because the Ourdhi had built their walls to human scales there was no room for dragons in the interior spaces, not even on the staircases. So the dragons got up and down on huge wooden steps built by the legion engineers.

“By the roar of the ancients, it is a strange thing for a dragon to be doing,” said the Purple Green as he sat beside them and curled his long tail around himself. “Climbing up onto a wall so we can fight with sword.” He carried the dragon sword and was wearing more armor than he had ever agreed to wear before, including the huge new helmet that the regimental smiths had made for him. Relkin knew that the Purple Green had come to understand the dangers of the life he’d taken up. But for the wild one to have to ask Relkin for help with extra armor would have been too much, a loss of dragon face. It was good that Hatlin was filling in.

“Strange?” said Bazil, who had taken Ecator from its long scabbard and was working the beautiful blade with a whetstone. “How is it strange? We always fight, that is what we do.”

“No, my wyvern friend, I mean the climbing is the strange thing to do. We are dragons, we should fly down and seize the prey, that is what we do!”

Bazil chortled. “I would like to fly, just once, to see what it is like.”

“Bah, wingless wyvern, you are crawling things!”

“Yes,” said the leatherback, calmly, refusing to allow the wild one to ruffle his scales, “but crawling things that fight!”

The Purple Green grunted with sour amusement. “As for that I am a crawling thing, too, now.” He took up a whetstone and began to work on his own blade. It passed the time to work the stone back and forth over the long, gleaming steel, honing the edge. A sharp edge was more important than ever because it was hard to cut the mud men apart without one.

The sun slowly rose in the sky. As it approached the zenith, the scene outside the walls began to change very swiftly. Quite suddenly great gangs of men, chained at the neck and urged on by imps with whips, flooded forward to the rear of the siege towers. Other men, in the black of the Sephisti army, ran forward in streams and climbed into the towers.

Whips cracked, imps bawled encouragement, and the towers came to life, shaking and rattling as they jerked forward and began to roll. And now began a thunder of drums as the drummers of Sephis began a constantly repeated
boom, boom, boom-it-ti-boom
, that went on and on until it seemed to pound in one’s blood.

Some ranging arrows streaked out of the towers as they rolled forward. No reply came from the walls, discipline held firm, and nobody wasted their arrows.

Thousands more men were swarming out of the suburbs and forming around the base of the siege towers. Among them were teams pulling forward catapults and trebuchets that had been assembled nearby. As soon as these siege engines were in place, they began hurling a flurry of great rocks soaring over the walls and crashing into the city behind.

Among the great stones, there were bottles of blazing oil and some of these began fires inside the walls. But most of the buildings close to the walls had already long been abandoned and pulled down to give the legion engineers more room to work, so there was little to damage. Now the legion’s own trebuchets, built with masts from the shipyards, started to return the enemy’s fire. Ranging slowly on the siege towers as they came onward. Soon rocks were striking the towers, and the hides began to break apart here and there.

The Argonathi archers had more targets now, and the first shots from the wall arched out at the towers. The flight of arrows began to thicken. Onward came the towers, the drums boomed louder and louder. The screams of men and the oaths of imp overseers mingled with the rumble of the huge wheels. And over everything thundered the drums.

On the walls, the weight of the defense huddled down and waited. The dragons and most of the men were actually back behind the withe and wicker shields that were set up down the middle of the wall. Along the battlements, only the dragonboys and the archers from Kenor waited with their bows at the ready. The boys used Cunfshon crossbows, beautiful little weapons that could be fired again and again, quickly and efficiently by a well-trained operator. Their range was not that great, however. The Kenor men employed the long bow, which took great strength to pull but which could fire a great distance and could be fired quickly, up to the limits of the bowman’s strength.

Now the bowmen began long-ranging shots on the upper decks of the approaching siege towers. And more shots were returned, the arrows whistling overhead and sticking in the withes.

Approaching head-on to Relkin’s section of the wall came the closest siege tower. The sides were covered in wet hides except for the drawbridge. There was little to shoot at, except the enemy archers on the upper fighting deck.