Domes of Fire (39 page)

The trees beyond the open space were dark cedars with swooping limbs that brushed the ground and concealed everything more than a few yards back into the forest. The clouds rolling in from the east grew thicker and the light back among the trees grew dim. The air hung motionless and sultry, and the whine of mosquitoes seemed to grow louder as they rode deeper into the woods.

‘I love wearing armour in mosquito country,’ Kalten said gaily. ‘I have this picture of hordes of the little
blood-suckers sitting around with teeny little hammers trying to pound their beaks straight again.’

‘They won’t really try to bite you through the steel, Sir Kalten,’ Zalasta told him. ‘They’re attracted by your smell, and I don’t think any living creature finds the smell of Elene armour all that appetising.’

‘You’re taking all the fun out of it, Zalasta.’

‘Sorry, Sir Kalten.’

There was a rumble far off to the east.

‘The perfect end to a day gone sour,’ Stragen observed, ‘a nice rousing thunderstorm with lots of lightning, hail, driving rain and howling winds.’

Then, echoing down some unseen canyon back in the forest there came a hoarse, roaring bellow. Almost immediately there came an answer from the opposite direction.

Sir Ulath swore, biting off curses the way a dog tears at a piece of meat.

‘What’s wrong?’ Sparhawk demanded.

‘Didn’t you recognise it, Sparhawk?’ the Thalesian said. ‘You’ve heard it before – back at Lake Venne.’

‘What is it?’ Khalad asked apprehensively.

‘It’s a signal that it’s time for us to fort up! Those are Trolls out there!’

‘It’s not perfect, friend Sparhawk,’ Kring said a bit dubiously, ‘but I don’t think we’ve got time to look for anything better.’

‘He’s right about that, Sparhawk,’ Ulath agreed. ‘Time’s definitely a major concern right now.’

The Peloi had ranged out into the surrounding forest in search of some defensible position. Given their nervousness about wooded terrain, Kring’s horsemen had displayed a great deal of courage in the search.

‘Can you give me some details?’ Sparhawk asked the shaved-headed Domi.

‘It’s a blind canyon, friend Sparhawk,’ Kring replied, nervously fingering the hilt of his sabre. ‘There’s a dried-up stream-bed running down the centre of it. From the look of it, I’d say that the stream runs full in the springtime. There seems to be a dry waterfall at the upper end. There’s a cave at the foot of the dry falls that should provide some protection for the women, and it’ll be a good place to defend if things get desperate.’

‘I thought they already were,’ Tynian noted.

‘How wide is the mouth of the canyon?’ Sparhawk asked intently.

‘The canyon mouth itself is maybe two hundred paces across,’ Kring told him, ‘but when you go back in a ways, it narrows down to about twenty paces. Then it widens out again into a sort of a basin where the falls are.’

‘The bad thing about a canyon is that you’re down in a hole,’ Kalten said. ‘It won’t take the Trolls too long to
go up to the canyon rim and start throwing rocks down on our heads.’

‘Do we have any choice?’ Tynian asked him.

‘No, but I thought I’d point it out.’

‘There’s no place else?’ Sparhawk asked the Domi.

‘A few clearings,’ Kring shrugged. ‘A hill or two that I could spit over.’

‘It looks like it’s the canyon then,’ Sparhawk said grimly. ‘We’d better get there and start putting up some sort of fortification across that narrow place.’

They gathered closely around the carriage and pushed their way into the forest. The carriage jolted over the rough ground, and on several occasions fallen logs had to be dragged out of the way. After about five hundred yards, though, the ground began to slope upward and the trees thinned out.

Sparhawk pulled Faran in beside the carriage.

‘There’s a cave ahead, Ehlana,’ he told his wife. ‘Kring’s men didn’t have time to explore it, so we don’t know how deep it is.’

‘What difference would that make?’ she asked him. Ehlana’s face was even more pale than usual. The bellowing of the Trolls far back in the forest had obviously unnerved her.

‘It might be very important,’ he replied. ‘When you get there, have Talen explore the place. If it goes back in far enough or branches out, you’ll have a place to hide. Sephrenia’s going to be with you, and she’ll be able to block the entrance and hide any side-chamber so that the Trolls can’t find you if they manage to get past us.’

‘Why don’t we all just go into the cave? You and Sephrenia can use magic to block the entrance, and we can just sit there until the Trolls get bored and go away.’

‘According to Kring, the cave’s not big enough. He’s got men out looking for another one, but we
know
this
one’s there. If something better turns up, we’ll change the plan, but for right now this is the best we can manage. You’ll take the other ladies, Patriarch Emban and Ambassador Oscagne and go inside. Talen will go in with you, and Berit and eight or ten other knights will cover the entrance to the cave. Please don’t argue, Ehlana. This is one of those situations where
I
make the decisions. You agreed to that back in Chyrellos.’

‘He’s right, your Majesty,’ Emban told her. ‘We need a general right now, not a queen.’

‘Am I encumbering you gentlemen?’ she asked tartly.

‘Not in the slightest, my Queen,’ Stragen said smoothly. ‘Your presence will inspire us to greater heights. We’ll dazzle you with our prowess and our courage.’

‘I’d be happy to simulate dazzlement if we could avoid this,’ she said in a worried voice.

‘I’m afraid you’d have to convince the Trolls on that score,’ Sparhawk told her, ‘and Trolls are very hard to convince – particularly if they’re hungry.’ Although the situation was grave, Sparhawk was not quite as desperately concerned about his wife’s safety as he might normally have been. Sephrenia would be there to protect her, and if things grew truly desperate, Aphrael could take a hand in the matter as well. He knew that his daughter would not permit any harm to come to her mother, even if it meant revealing her identity.

The canyon had its drawbacks, there was no question about that. The most obvious was the one Kalten had raised. If the Trolls ever reached the canyon rim above them, the situation would quickly become untenable. Kalten made quite an issue of pointing that out. ‘I told you so’ figured prominently in his remarks.

‘I think you’re over-estimating the intelligence of Trolls, Kalten,’ Ulath disagreed. ‘They’ll come straight
at us, because they’ll be thinking of us as food, not as enemies. Supper’s more important to them than a military victory.’

‘You’re just loaded with cheery thoughts today, aren’t you, Ulath?’ Tynian said dryly. ‘How many of them do you think there are?’

‘It’s hard to say,’ Ulath shrugged. ‘I’ve heard ten different voices so far – probably the heads of families. There’s probably a hundred or so of them out there at the very least.’

‘It could be worse,’ Kalten said.

‘Not by very much,’ Ulath disagreed. ‘A hundred Trolls could have given Wargun’s whole army some serious problems.’

Bevier, their expert on fortifications and defensive positions, had been surveying the canyon. ‘There are plenty of rocks in the stream-bed for breastworks,’ he observed, ‘and whole thickets of saplings for stakes. Ulath, how long do you think we have before they attack?’

Ulath scratched at his chin. ‘The fact that we’re stopping gives us a bit more space,’ he mused. ‘If we were still moving, they’d attack right away, but now they’ll probably take their time and gather their forces. I believe you might want to re-think your strategy though, Bevier. Trolls aren’t going to shoot arrows at us, so breastworks aren’t really necessary. Actually, they’d hinder
us
more than they would the Trolls. Our advantage lies in our horses – and our lances. You really want to keep Trolls at a distance if you possibly can. The sharpened stakes would be good, though. A Troll takes the easiest way to get at what he wants – us, in this case. If we can clutter up the sides of this narrow place and funnel them through so that only a few at a time can come at us, we’ll definitely improve the situation. We don’t want to take on more of them at any one time
than we absolutely have to. What I’d really like is a dozen or so of Kurik’s crossbows.’

‘I have one, Sir Ulath,’ Khalad volunteered.

‘And many of the knights have longbows,’ Bevier added.

‘We slow them down with the stakes so that we can pick them off with arrows?’ Tynian surmised.

‘That’s the best plan,’ Ulath agreed. ‘You don’t want to go hand to hand with a Troll if you can possibly avoid it.’

‘We’d better get at it, then,’ Sparhawk told them.

The work was feverish for the next hour. The narrow gap was necked down even more with boulders from the stream-bed, and a forest of sharpened stakes, all slanting sharply outward, was planted to the front. There was a method to the planting of the stakes. They bristled so thickly along the sides of the gap as to be well-nigh impenetrable, but the corridor leading to the basin at the head of the canyon was planted only sparsely with them to encourage the monsters to follow that route. Kring’s Peloi found a large bramble thicket, uprooted the thorn-bushes and threw them back among the thick-planted stakes at the sides to further impede progress.

‘What’s Khalad doing there?’ Kalten asked, puffing and sweating with the large rock he carried in his arms.

‘He’s building something,’ Sparhawk replied.

‘This isn’t really the time for the construction of camp improvements, Sparhawk.’

‘He’s a sensible young man. I’m sure he’s usefully occupied.’

At the end of the hour, they stopped to survey the fruits of their labours. The gap had been narrowed to no more than eight feet wide, and the ground at the sides of the gap was dense with chest-high stakes angled so that they would keep the Trolls on the right path. Tynian, however, added one small embellishment. A
number of his Alciones were driving pegs into the middle of the pathway and then sharpening the protruding ends.

‘Trolls don’t wear shoes, do they?’ he asked Ulath.

‘It’d take half a cow-hide to make shoes for a Troll,’ Ulath shrugged, ‘and they eat cows hide and all, so they’re a little short of leather.’

‘Good. We want to keep them in the centre of the canyon, but we don’t want to make it
too
easy for them. Barefoot Trolls aren’t going to run through
that
stubble-field – not after the first few yards, anyway.’

‘I like your style, Tynian,’ Ulath grinned.

‘Could you gentlemen stand off to one side, please?’ Khalad called. He had cut two fairly sturdy saplings off so that the stumps were about head high and had then lashed a third across them. Then he had strung a rope across the ends of the horizontal sapling and drawn it tight to form a huge bow. The bow was fully drawn, tied off to another stump at the rear, and it was loaded with a ten-foot javelin.

Sparhawk and the others moved off to the sides of the narrow cut, and Khalad released the bow by cutting the rope that held it drawn. The javelin shot forward with a sharp whistling sound and buried itself deep into a tree a good hundred yards down the canyon.

‘I’m going to like that boy,’ Kalten smiled. ‘He’s almost as good at this sort of thing as his father was.’

‘The family shows a lot of promise,’ Sparhawk agreed. ‘Let’s position our archers so that they have a clear shot at that gap.’

‘Right,’ Kalten agreed. ‘What then?’

‘Then we wait.’

‘That’s the part I hate the most. Why don’t we grab something to eat? Just to pass the time, of course.’

‘Of course.’

The storm which had been building to the east all morning was closer now, the clouds purplish-black and seething. There were flickers of lightning deep inside the cloud bank, and the thunder rolled from horizon to horizon, shaking the ground with every peal.

They waited. The air was dead calm and sultry and the knights were sweating uncomfortably in their armour.

‘Can we think of anything else?’ Tynian asked.

‘I’ve contrived a few rudimentary catapults,’ Bevier replied. ‘They’re hardly more than bent saplings, so they won’t throw very big rocks, and their range is limited.’

‘I’ll take all the help I can get when it comes to fighting Trolls,’ Ulath told him. ‘Every one of them we knock down before they get to us is one less we’ll have to fight.’

‘Dear God!’ Tynian exclaimed.

‘What?’ Kalten demanded with a certain alarm.

‘I think I just saw one of them back at the edge of the forest. Are they all that big?’

‘Nine feet or so tall?’ Ulath asked quite casually.

‘At least.’

‘That’s fairly standard for a Troll, and they weigh between thirty-five and fifty stone.’

‘You’re not serious!’ Kalten said incredulously.

‘Wait just a bit and you’ll be able to weigh one for yourself.’ Ulath looked around at them. ‘Trolls are hard to kill,’ he cautioned. ‘Their hides are very tough, and their skull-bones are almost a half-inch thick. They can take a lot of punishment when they’re excited. If we get in close, try to maim them. You can’t really count on clean kills with Trolls, so every arm you chop off is one less the Troll can grab you with.’

‘Will they have weapons of any kind?’ Kalten asked.

‘Clubs are about all. They aren’t good with spears. Their arms aren’t hooked on right for jabbing.’

‘That’s something, anyway.’

‘Not very much,’ Tynian told him.

They waited as the thunder moved ponderously toward them.

They saw several more Trolls at the edge of the forest in the next ten minutes, and the bellowing roars of those scouts were obviously summoning the rest of the pack. The only Troll Sparhawk had ever seen before had been Ghwerig, and Ghwerig had been dwarfed and grossly deformed. He quickly began to revise his assessment of the creatures. They were, as Ulath had stated, about nine feet tall, and they were covered with dark-brown, shaggy fur. Their arms were very long, and their huge hands hung below their knees. Their faces were brutish, with heavy brow-ridges, muzzle-like mouths and protruding fangs. Their eyes were small, deep-set and they burned with a dreadful hunger. They slouched along at the edge of the forest, not really trying to conceal themselves, and Sparhawk clearly saw that their long arms played a significant part in their locomotion, sometimes serving as an additional leg and sometimes grasping trees to help pull themselves along. Their movements were flowing, even graceful, and bespoke an enormous agility.

‘Are we more or less ready?’ Ulath asked them.

‘I could stand to wait a little longer,’ Kalten replied.

‘How long?’

‘Forty or fifty years sounds about right to me. What did you have in mind?’

‘I’ve seen about fifteen different individuals,’ the big Thalesian noted. ‘They’re coming out one by one to have a look, and that means that they’re all more or less gathered just back under the trees. I thought I’d insult them for a while. When a Troll gets angry, he doesn’t really
think. Of course Trolls don’t have very much to think with in the first place. I’d like to provoke them into an ill-considered attack if possible. If I
really
insult them, they’ll scream and howl and then come rushing out of those woods foaming at the mouths. They’ll be easy targets for the bowmen at that point, and if a few of them get through, we can charge them with our horses and the lances. We should be able to kill quite a few of them before they come to their senses. I’d really like to whittle down their numbers, and enraged Trolls make easy targets.’

‘Do you think we might be able to kill enough of them to frighten the rest away?’ Kalten asked.

‘I wouldn’t count on it, but anything’s possible, I suppose. I’d have sworn that you couldn’t get a hundred Trolls to even walk in the same direction at the same time, so the situation here’s completely new to me.’