The Seventh Friend (Book 1) (46 page)

The remainder of the day was strange. The Seth Yarra army arrayed itself before the gate, at what might have been considered a safe distance. They were beyond bowshot for any of the men on the wall, but Pascha, the sparrow, lord of the air, had retaken her seat high on the mountain. No sooner had the
y ordered themselves than an arrow fell from on high and the black clad officer who stood at the head of the column folded over.

For twenty minutes there was panic. Arrows fell unerringly among the officers, and by the time they had reformed their ranks in the forest fringe where she could not touch them, twenty-three black shrouded bodies lay on the killing ground.

That was a victory in itself, Arbak reflected.

Their next move was also unexpected. There was a conversation between the Seth Yarra officers and the Telans who had retreated the previous day, but the Seth Yarra did not appear to heed any warnings they might have received. There was great industry in the forest, and the soldiers emerged bearing the remains of several trees. They had felled them, limbed them and bound them into a formidable battering ram. They meant to try the gate.

“They mean to try the gate,” Tragil said. Arbak could hear the amused disbelief in his voice. Tragil knew, and Arbak knew that the outer gate would fall to such an assault. But that was the point. Behind the outer gate was the great stone – a stone that the Telans had not been able to damage in the days that they had held the pass unopposed. It was a waste of effort.

“Now you see what store they set by their allies,” Arbak said. “They have been told that the gate will not break – the Telans know it well enough – but they do not believe.”

It was all time, and time was good.

The ram was brought forwards beneath a canopy of shields. The soldiers held them high and to the side, but such canopies are imperfect, and arrows threaded the gaps between the shields. Men fell.

Tragil had oil up on the fighting platform again, and men stood above the gate with iron cauldrons, sheltering from the flights of Seth Yarra arrows that occasionally swept the battlements. Arbak crouched on one knee next to him. He admired Tragil’s patience, and his lack of emotion. Sheyani was not playing, but for now it did not matter. The gate would not fall; the men were full of confidence.

They all felt the crash as the ram struck the gate for the first time. Tragil raised his hand and looked at the men with the oil. They shifted their weight, preparing to lift their burden. A man a few paces away lit a torch from the fire in the tower and crouched, looking at Tragil expectantly.

The ram struck a second time. Still he made no signal. One of the Berashi archers fell from the wall – the first to die. His comrades responded with a volley, some risking putting their bodies above the wall to shoot down at the ram.

A third blow shivered the wall, and Tragil dropped his hand. Men strained and the cauldron tipped, spraying oil over the first ten ranks of men, wetting the shields and the ram alike. The man with the torch moved a second later, throwing it down among them with force.

For a moment the explosion of flames topped the wall. Arbak saw the yellow tongues licking at the stone, dark smoke whipping up into the sky and disappearing into the shimmer of heat. The screams followed a moment later as men realised they were on fire, as pain overcame discipline. Arbak couldn’t see it. He was still crouched behind the wall, but he had a good imagination – a curse for a soldier, he had always thought – and allowed others to risk Seth Yarra shafts to view the carnage.

“The ram is burning,” Tragil said. He sounded satisfied. “So is the gate. I wonder if they will try again.” He signalled his men, and they climbed awkwardly down the tall steps with the cauldron, going to fetch more oil in case it was needed. The number of Seth Yarra arrows increased for a brief while, whistling and clattering angrily against the stone, but the men kept their heads down and the volleys had little effect.

Their own archers shot with greater success. The Seth Yarra men had advanced to loose their shafts. They were within range and unprotected. Many died before they abandoned the unequal contest, turned and scrambled back towards the tree line.

“Collect their arrows,” Arbak called down to the men who crowded beneath the wall. Many Seth Yarra arrows lay on the ground behind the gate. Some of the shafts were broken, but he could see a great number that remained intact. There was no reason that they could not be used by his own archers to defend the wall.

The first of many pauses in the battle gave them all a moment to rest. Arbak climbed down the stairs. He was serving no useful purpose on the wall. Indeed, he was striving to find any purpose that he might serve. He could not shoot a bow, could barely wield a blade, and Tragil was quite expert in the defence of his position. He found Coyan among his men, talking to Sheyani. All the men looked impatient for battle to be joined. They fingered the hilts of their blades; they looked at the recently sounded gate. He understood. Waiting was worse than fighting. There was no worry when blades were drawn, blood spilt. You did what you could and you lived or died. Waiting was harder.

“Will they come soon, Sheshay?” she asked, her words echoing the mind of every man. He shook his head.

“They came expecting the gate to be in the hands of allies. They are unprepared.”

Coyan raised an eyebrow. “No ladders?”

“If they want to storm the wall they will have to make them. It will take a day or two perhaps, when they give up on the gate.”

“It will be a bloody job to hold them,” Coyan said.

Arbak could see it in his mind’s eye. He had been at the storming of Calnestra, a walled town, and that had been taken with ladders. It was an expensive way to fight, men died in numbers, but it worked if you could get a foothold on the walls. Seth Yarra had the numbers, and they would build enough ladders to cover the walls, two or three hundred of them carried across the open ground and laid against the wall all at once. There would be no avoiding it – Seth Yarra could put more men on the top than they could with their makeshift stair.

If there was some way of denying them a part of the wall, whole sections of the wall, so that they must face his men on both sides, then that would give them an advantage. They already had an advantage, of course. The enemy must cross open ground under the bows of his archers, they must then climb ladders up to a platform on which his men waited, but they had the numbers. If they lost three thousand men in the assault they would still outnumber the defenders by more than two to one. If they captured the fighting platform it would all be over.

What they needed was a way to hold the ladders off the wall somehow, to stop the men stepping from the ladder onto the wall. Men with poles might do it, but men with poles would have to stand at the wall, and would be easily shot down by Seth Yarra archers supporting the assault.

What they needed was a curtain, a bar that prevented the ladders from touching the wall. It was a simple idea, and if he was designing a wall to withstand an assault he would certainly consider building such a thing into the stonework. But the wall was already built. The enemy would attack within a day, perhaps two.

An idea flashed into his head. It was such an odd image that he dismissed it at once, then brought it back again. He examined it. Tried to think what it would be like to climb the ladders if such a thing existed, but there were so many alternatives. Given a week it might become a good idea, refined by argument and consideration, but he had no time, and so it would be a desperate, half baked idea.

“Jerash?”

“Sir?” A head stuck out over the edge of the fighting platform above him.

“Are your friends up there?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Bring them down. I have another job for you.”

It had been a mild winter until now, or a long autumn. But now the sky was grey, and the air was wet with sleet and rain, driving out of the west like retribution. The roads were turning to mud, and Skal Hebberd’s world was spinning on its axis. After Henfray everything was changed.

The Skal Hebberd who rode hunched against the weather at the head of eight hundred men was not the same man who had left Bas Erinor a month before, confident, arrogant, and impatient with life. That Skal Hebberd had known his quality, had been free of doubt, self sufficient, had despised his betters.

Betters. It was a bitter word for Skal. Before he had left Bas Erinor he would not have acknowledged anyone as a better, probably not as an equal, though he would have shown a grudging respect for those he thought capable – the duke, various other members of the Avilian nobility, the Wolf. It was a short list.

But Skal was quick to learn. He was intelligent. In the past he had not been much given to thinking, and he had instead assumed things about the world. It all seemed to bend so easily to his will. He learned his lessons, remembered facts, demonstrated great physical prowess at everything he attempted. He was demonstrably better that his peers. There had been Quinnial, of course. Many years ago there had been Quinnial the Perfect, his only rival, beloved second son of the duke, an alternate sun around which the lesser creatures of the court revolved. But Quinnial had fallen under a horse, his arm had been destroyed, and he became Quinnial the Cripple, the court joke, hiding from his erstwhile companions, locked in his rooms like some hideous secret.

When he re-emerged from seclusion he had not seemed a threat at all. Common sense suggested that he was only half a man, and yet others were still drawn to him, pulled away from Skal’s sphere of control. Skal had fought back with the only tools he had; his keen wit and physical prowess. He had belittled Quinnial at every turn, told jokes about his arm, become stronger, faster, more deadly.

For all that he did, there was still something about Quinnial that eluded him. There was a silence that he could not penetrate, a calm that would not be ruffled. It was like trying to bait the duke. The duke treated him like a puppy, which he was almost prepared to tolerate from the old man, though it bred in him a dislike for Quinnial’s father. From Quinnial such condescension was intolerable.

His own fall, the abasement of his family’s blood, had been shocking. It had torn his world apart, and he had sought someone to blame. There was only one man to whom the guilt stuck with any conviction, and that was his own father. Skal was no traitor. He despised other nations simply for not being Avilian, for not being what he was. To learn that his father had been plotting with Seth Yarra was almost more than he could bear. He had been filled with anger, and even facing the prospect of sharing in the blame for his father’s treachery had not cooled him. He had spat and snarled at those who held him – Quinnial especially. He had expected punishment, even death.

It was the point where his world began again.

Quinnial did something that Skal did not understand. He trusted him, gave him soldiers to command, a rank, a chance. Skal could see the advantage in it. With every drop of noble blood playing at war with Narak on the Great Plains he was probably the only man schooled in strategy remaining in Bas Erinor. If Quinnial wanted the soldiers to defeat the Seth Yarra he was the obvious choice, but if their roles had been reversed he would not have done the same. Quinnial was a rival. Even crippled he was someone who stole worth from Skal.

He had accepted the commission. Nothing could be worse than being a common man without rank, and a colonel’s command was not to be sneered at. He had command and he had a chance to distinguish himself.

A simple job. It should have been easy. He had numbers and cavalry. He knew enough about Seth Yarra to know how to beat them. He had studied all the battles of the last Great War and learned Remard’s strategies.

They rode along the coast to the enemy’s last reported position. He used caution, sending scouts ahead and widely to either side. His men saw nothing, day after day, and he pushed them hard. He wanted to catch these men, to kill them, and be back in Bas Erinor in time to pick up any other opportunity that might bring him renown.

Then the scouts had come back to tell him they had picked up the trail.

“You are sure?” he had asked. “There is no mistake?”

The scouts had exchanged a look.

“No mistake, colonel,” one had replied.

When he rode into the village he understood. The buildings were burned. There was not a barn or a house or even a shed that had escaped. It had become a village of charred timbers, heaped at unnatural angles, broken slates, brick chimneys tumbled down on the choked streets. But it was not the broken houses that demanded his attention. It was the smell. The village and the fields around it carried the stench of carrion, and when he rode into what remained of the village square Skal saw why.

Every man, woman and child, all the people who had lived here, had been slaughtered and piled in a bloody, stinking heap in the middle of their village. They had been left to rot.

Some of his men vomited on the ground. Skal turned his horse away from the sight and walked it to the windward side of the village where he stopped and sat looking at the bare branches of orchard trees, and the green grass. From here he could smell the sharp seaweed and salt freshness of the sea. Another horse stopped beside him. A glance told him that it was one of his lieutenants, a man called Hanishaw.

“Do you think they resisted?” Skal asked.

“Even if they did…”

“I know. It’s too much.”

“Do you want us to bury them, colonel?”

Skal had to think. What he’d seen had wrenched him from his academic, comfortable view of war. This wasn’t war. It was butchery. He was himself a man who did not flinch at cruelty, but this was disgusting, wasteful, excessive. It made him ill to think of all that blood spilt, and for what purpose?

“No,” he said. “It would take a week, and we don’t have the time. Burn them. The gods alone know what else they’ve done and I want to catch them before they kill every Avilian on the south coast.”

So they rode on, leaving a column of smoke behind them. Its sweet, rotten smell haunted them for a day. All the smiles were gone now. The adventure of war had become something else, something that had to be done. There were more villages, and in each one they found the same thing; burned houses, the dead piled up and rotting in the open air. There were carrion birds everywhere.

The one good thing, the thing that Skal focussed on, was that such killing took time. The Seth Yarra raiders were moving slowly across Avilian, and he was moving quickly. It would not be long before they met. He had never been angry before, he thought. His peevish, childish snapping did not compare to this. He was filled with a deep, raging fire; an urgent desire to kill. He looked eagerly forwards each day, wishing that he had mounts for all his men. He made his cavalry walk to rest the horses. He made them march fourteen hours each day, and still he fretted that they did not move fast enough.

His scouts brought in a survivor. She was a woman of fifty years, grey and wiry. Her clothes were torn and dirty and she was wild eyed, cringing under the frightened, gentle touch of the Avilian soldiers.

They fed her, put her in a wagon, found a cloak to wrap around her, and by evening she had regained some of her composure. Skal questioned her himself, and he, too, was gentle. It was like talking to an ancient piece of glass that could shatter at too loud a word.

He learned that they were close; closer than he had dared to imagine – he was just two days behind. There was a village, too, a village a day’s ride from here, a day’s walk. He knew that Seth Yarra would be there now, killing people, burning houses. The men would want to leave at once, ride all night, fall on the enemy at dawn. Hanishaw asked him what he was going to do.

“Will any of our people be alive by morning, do you think?” he asked.

Hanishaw shook his head. “They’re already dead,” he said.

“There is another village beyond that one – half a day’s travel. It is where they will go next.”

“Then we must ride now!”

“There is no need for haste. I have studied every field they have defiled with their presence. The Seth Yarra rest after a day’s work. They make camp by the village, move on the next day. They leave middens, camp fires, tracks like a trader caravan. They do not care if we follow, and they are not in a hurry. We will leave here in the morning, and by dusk we will be where we need to be, and have the night to rest again before they come.”

Rest. There would be no rest. The men were keen for blood, but Skal needed time to think. He could not afford to be so hot headed. That was the road to mindless, toe to toe warfare, the reduction of conflict to mere numbers. It was the first failing of a poor commander. Skal now had a second, precious advantage. He had the choice of ground; the luxury of preparation.

The next day he pushed them even harder, but not one man complained. Skal had grown up a lord, full of contempt for the common man, but this scratch regiment of apprentices and volunteers impressed him. They marched with the same grim determination that he felt in his own heart, and yet there was little for them to gain. They would obey orders, they would fight and some of them would die, and at the end of it all they would be what they were. The survivors would go back to the city and pick up their lives if they could. The glory of any victory would go to Skal.

The sun was still not set when they crested a rise and saw the village laid out like a map, a picture of rural tranquillity. It was a good sized place, perhaps three hundred people, eighty houses of traditional form, whitewashed and tiled, straddling a river, adorned with fruit trees and boasting the sort of chaotic but harmonious street plan that found favour with Avilian poets. There was a tall barn, white walled and half timbered, an orchard, a large central square. It was pretty.

He could see people in the village, living people, going about their business in the way that people had done for years. The sight of it eased a tension inside Skal, and he knew that for all his reasoning and certainty he was glad to be right. He left most of his men on the skyline and rode down to the village with Hanishaw and his other two lieutenants, and ten men besides.

People gathered around them in the square, curious, but not talkative. All villages like this had a head man, a head woman, and it was their job to speak to strangers. Skal waited patiently. It was obvious who the head man was when he appeared, slowly walking through the gathered villagers who opened before him, then closed up again, eager not to miss a word.

He was not an old man, but heavy set, muscular, with about fifty summers behind him. He did not speak until he was standing before Skal’s mount.

“My lords, I welcome you to the village of Henfray” he said. “How may we serve you?” Despite his words there was no trace of humility in his voice. Skal looked down at him, and for a moment the thought flashed through his mind that he should put this disrespectful farmer in his place, but he put it aside. There was a job to be done here. He could see the man’s eyes stray to the soldiers on the ridge.

“I am Colonel Hebberd, volunteer regiment of the Seventh Friend, and it is we who shall serve you, headman,” Skal said. “You know there is a war being fought?” He could not resist the urge to teach, to test the man.

“Some word of it has been spoken,” the man said. His eyes flicked again to the soldiers. Soldiers were never a good thing, his eyes said. Skal leaned forwards as though to impart something in a quiet voice, something that he did not want the rest of the village to hear, but he did not lower his voice.

“It is here,” he said. “Seth Yarra soldiers have burned seven of our villages, and they will be here in the morning. We are here to protect you.”

“Here?” the headman asked. He looked sceptical. Skal pointed down the road, and hundreds of eyes followed his arm.

“There,” he said. “In the morning they will come down that road.”

The headman looked at him, then down the road which tracked innocently along the banks of the river in the shade of tall poplars and willows, then back at Skal. He nodded.