Dragon Heart (14 page)

“Well, now,” he said. “I have an idea. Get some rope.”

*   *   *

All afternoon, Luka led the townspeople down the beach, a loose pack of fifty-odd, mostly women. He looked them over as they went; he expected a few to drop out, but none did. Each of them carried something, a shovel, an axe, and many had made packs of their shawls, or had baskets on their arms, to bring food. Lumilla, walking alongside her daughter, was frowning as she walked, her face set. Osa the potter's widow sang some of the time, and a few of the others with her. Up in front, Aken marched along, still wearing his bloody apron, the great block of his body in his striped shirt like a moving tree trunk. The fisherman Freo, beside him, looked like a wisp.

They came to Sinking Cove. Here the coast bent inward, cupping a beach of fine, dark sand littered with driftwood and seaweed. The water was pale blue far out beyond the surf line, the shallows studded with jagged black rocks like rings of teeth that broke the surge of the waves. Luka sent the people off to the high side of the beach, to rest and eat. With Jeon and the butcher Aken and some others Luka walked around the beach awhile, watching the sea.

“Where's the tide?” Luka said.

“Full high, by the drift.” That was Freo, who did a lot of clamming here.

“Good. Build a wall here. Use all this driftwood. It doesn't have to be solid, just enough to slow a horse. Down to the tide's edge.”

Jeon fingered his bow. He thought this would be much easier if Luka had killed all those other soldiers, back when he had them at his mercy. The cliff loomed up over them. On that highland, if Luka was right, thirty or forty Imperial pikemen were marching along. Up ahead, Jeon knew, a creek inlet through the cliff made an easy way down to the water's edge.

They would charge all at once. Many of them had horses. But the beach here was narrow; that might slow them down. Jeon gave a look around at the townspeople—more numbers than the soldiers. He wished more of them were men. They had gone to help Luka and Aken build the wall, piling up driftwood, hooking the bare grey branches around one another, jamming pieces into the crotches of other pieces. Aken made a rude joke and they all laughed.

Luka went around talking to people, helping with the wall, giving orders, and Jeon trailed after him, waiting to be told what to do. The tide was sliding away down the beach. To the south, against the blue sky above the beach, a faint brown haze rose into the air.

The ebb of the tide had left a bare stretch of sand below the end of the wall, but when Aken and his boy started out to build the wall down to fill it Luka stopped them.

“No. Leave that.” He put out his arm and held Aken back.

“Papa, help me.” The boy had run on ahead, into the wave, and when the wave pulled back he was stuck in the wet sand. Luka reached out, got his hand, and helped him pull free.

“See? Just build down to here.” Luka pointed to the end of his wall.

He walked up behind the wall, and gathered the women together, hugging them each by turn, Lumilla, Amillee, Osa, the three sisters from the weavery, Suan the baker's apprentice, the cobbler's widow, and the fishermen's widows and their daughters. “My sisters, you are brave. You make me glad and proud. Show me your weapons.”

They stood around him with their shovels and paddles and forks. He made sure each of them had something useful. “This will be hard, now, and they will come at you heaviest. You must all stay together, arm to arm. Fight together. One of you can't throw a man. Three of you can. Stay together; help each other.” He turned to Jeon.

“Go up on the cliff, where you can cover that end of the wall. Be careful. Have you got enough arrows?”

“No,” Jeon said, who had twenty arrows. “But who does?” His voice sounded squeaky. He put his arm around Luka, and Luka embraced him, solid and strong. Jeon turned and went up toward the cliff.

The landward end of Luka's wall came up against the toe of an old slide. Twenty feet above the beach the slumping head of the slide had formed a ledge. He put the bow on his back, and climbed up onto the narrow shelf of dirt.

From this height, he could see much better. The tide was ebbing faster, leaving behind a widening stretch of flat sand.

The wind drove a fine ripple over it. A sheet of water covered it, as if the sand were sweating. His heart leapt. This happened in certain places all along the coast, and now he understood what Luka was doing. Down there, the brown haze was getting closer. Jeon unsheathed his bow.

*   *   *

Even after the long walk up the beach Amillee was so jittery her legs quivered. She stood by the driftwood wall, looking ahead, where their enemies would appear. Luka and two other men were rolling a big stump up into the wall; she went to help them. When the stump was solidly in place Luka took her by the arm.

“Stay in the middle of the line. Keep everybody together. Where's your weapon?”

“I left it so I could help you.”

“Never let go of it. Go get it.”

She ran back for the long staff she had brought, and took it to him. He took hold of it and moved her hands along it.

“Hold it like this, one hand here, the other here, your fingers going the same way—yes. Now how do you fight?”

She let go with one hand, swung the staff around point first, and lunged with it. Around them a cheer went up: people were watching. He got her arm again and took the bar away.

“No. Don't poke. You're finished if you poke. Hold it as I showed you. Use it like this.”

He held the staff across his body, and thrust it forward broadside. “Osa, come at me.”

Osa had a spade; she lifted it over her shoulder and rushed at him, and he took a step and brought the staff up crosswise between them. “Hit me, Osa! Come on, hit me!”

Osa whacked at him and he met the spade on his staff and slipped it off; she swung the spade around full wide, and again he got the staff across its path and knocked it aside.

“Like that.” He put the staff into Amillee's hands. “All of you.” He turned to the other people, went in among them, putting their weapons right in their hands.

Upon the cliff, his little brother Jeon called out, “They're coming, Luka!”

Amillee clutched the staff. Her stomach gathered into a knot. They were all moving now, up to the wall. The wall looked so little, so stupid. Her feet wouldn't move. She might die. She forced herself forward, up to the wall, only as high as her waist, and saw the horses coming down the beach toward her, the crowd of pikes like a little forest, and her with only a stick in her hand.

Osa stood beside her, shoulder to shoulder. Lumilla on the other side. All together, they waited, and Amillee felt the sweat running down her back. She wanted to shut her eyes. She gripped the staff, waiting.

*   *   *

Broga reined up a moment, the eight horsemen of his guard around him, and waved to the pikemen, on foot, to stop them also. They had come to the edge of a crescent-shaped cove, and there, on the far side, was a clot of wood and bodies.

He grunted. The cliff here was high and steep, and where the enemy was gathered, the beach pinched down to a narrow approach like a funnel. He turned to the rider just behind him, whom he knew to be farsighted.

“What do you make of this?”

The guardsman saluted him smartly. He said, “My lord, it looks like a lot of the townspeople. It's mostly women, sir. They've got some barricade up.”

Broga made another growling sound in his chest. These people should not have been here; Oto should have been battling them in the town, so Broga could come up behind them. The thought came to him that maybe they had beaten Oto.

Broga did not believe that, but here he was, facing them, his brother nowhere.

Broga looked from side to side. On the ocean side, clearly, there was no chance for an ambush. The cliff side above most of the cove was bare wind-blasted rock, broken only by the crease of an old landslide. He faced forward again.

“My lord,” said the long-sighted guardsman. “There's an archer on the cliff, there above where the rest are. Just one, though.”

Broga stared, his hands on his saddlebow, trying to focus on that part of the cliff, and saw something move. A seagull glided over his head, the shadow across the ground ahead of him, and hovered there, as if it watched him. Spying. Broga's scalp prickled up. Then he straightened, pleased.

“Look, they've made a mistake. They built their little wall down when the tide was high, and now it's going out.” His voice was velvety with satisfaction. He beckoned to the soldier commanding the pikemen.

“I want you in two columns. We'll march straight along that beach, there. Five strides from those people up there, charge. They won't move; they have a wall up. Your men go straight at the wall. They're women. They can't stand against you. I will lead my guard to circle around and take them from behind. It will be over in a moment. Glory to the Empire!”

“Glory to the Empire.” The soldier saluted him, wheeled, and went to order his men.

They started off along the curve of the beach, jogging along the crusty dark sand. One hand up, Broga kept his horsemen back, letting the pikemen get well out in front, to draw the ragtag mob of the townspeople off to defend. So they were doing. As the Imperials came closer everybody on the wall rushed toward the middle. Now he could see the skirts, the aprons, the round faces of the women. This would be easy. After, he would let the men have some fun with the women. He reined in, his guards behind him. The two columns trotted forward. A horn blew, and they broke into a run at the wall, their long blades swinging down level.

A scream rose, and then a chorus of them, shrieks and cries. The soldiers were climbing up onto the wall. Broga swung his arm down, and led his horsemen at a gallop down onto the wet sand, to cut around the end of the wall and finish these people off.

*   *   *

Amillee gripped her staff, her breath stuck in her lungs, facing like an incoming wave a glistening spread of blades, aimed all at her. She screamed. They were all screaming. The first pike thrust across the top of their wall, and Amillee shrank back away from the wall.

On her left Suan lunged into her place and got the handle of her shovel under the pike. Lumilla leaned in from the other side to help her. They filled up Amillee's space. There was no room for her now. Suan staggered back, blood spurting from the side of her face. Now there was a hole. Amillee longed to run, to get away, but she had to fill that space. She had to get back up there. She held the staff across her body and forced her legs to move on up again, into the pack of the women, beside her mother.

Lumilla had managed to get hold of a pike. She stood on widespread feet, Aken on her far side, fending off the blows of an iron-hatted pikeman. From the side another blade flashed toward her, slantwise across Amillee's vision, and she lashed out with the staff in her hands. She could not let them hurt her mother. Amillee clubbed the pike down, the way Luka had shown her. Another thrust at her and from the other side Lumilla's pike thrust past Amillee and the Imperial man recoiled, and Osa lurched up and hacked at him. Osa banged into Amillee, knocking her sideways; Lumilla like a wall held her up. Across the driftwood another iron hat swam into her focus, a yellow beard, a red mouth, above the glinting edge of the blade, and then an arrow smacked him in the face and he fell.

Keep on. She tried to keep her staff in some rhythm with Lumilla's pike. A blow struck Amillee's arm; she wasn't sure if it came from an Imperial or one of her own people. A sharp pain sliced through her shoulder. She could not do this anymore. She kept on doing it. She gasped for breath, her mother beside her, blood all over her now.

*   *   *

As they broke from their trot into a run, the pikemen came into range of Jeon's bow. He fired an arrow, saw it hit, and that man stagger, but Jeon's next shot missed, and the third ticked off a helmet. The cliff pushed the soldiers together, kept them from hitting the wall all at once, but when the first few smashed into the driftwood the whole ramshackle thing seemed to buckle. In the center the townspeople shrank back from the layers of blades. The narrow front of the wedge of pikemen crowded over the wall after them. Gritting his teeth, he shot arrows steadily into that pack of striped doublets. Luka ran up the wall, leapt onto a stump, swinging his arm to urge his people on. The pikes before him swung at once toward him and he stood lashing out at them with his fishing gaff. The townspeople stiffened; the women pushed back into the center of the wall, and stood.

But Broga's horsemen had held back. Now, Jeon saw, they were charging.

He drew the bow, but they were far out of range, galloping down two by two onto the damp sand, to get around the end of the wall. Jeon stood up. Broga led them, his horse three lengths ahead of the rest. From this high place Jeon could see the whole beach—how, as the horses galloped onto the damp stretch just above the surf, the sand suddenly blanched, all the water on the surface drawn inward like a breath, and with the next long stride Broga's horse sank down into the beach all the way to its chest.

Broga hurtled off. His horse flopped over, thrashing up gouts of the sand, driving itself deeper. Six of the horses behind him, going too fast to stop, floundered into the waterlogged beach around him. All the sand was rippling; as the horses scrambled for footing they churned it to a morass. Broga's horse had drowned, only its hindquarter showing.

The last two riders had skidded to a stop before they went in and sat uncertainly in their saddles watching. One took a brass horn from his saddlebow and blew a long, plaintive call on it. The other man leapt off his horse and dashed out onto the sloppy sand toward Broga and was gobbled up to his crotch. The horn blew again, frantic, and again.

Broga had hit the ground sprawled on his back. Now he struggled to get up and his legs disappeared. He bellowed, lunging helplessly toward the dry sand only a few yards away, and fell deeper into the grip of the beach. One of the other trapped riders crawled out of his saddle and plunged in up to his waist. His horse tried to rear up and one hoof lashed out and struck him so hard his helmet flew off and he sagged down bonelessly into the sand. The others sat where they were, looking wildly around. The riderless horse had fallen back into the sand, but now it clawed its forehand up out of the grip of the beach again and ramped forward, toward Broga. Broga flung his arms up to protect his head.