Authors: Nicholas Anderson
He nodded.
“Thanks to you,” he added when he’d recovered his voice.
Rawl got to his
feet. He staggered and Josie grabbed his arm and steadied him. They
turned towards where they’d left the others.
“Please,” rasped
a voice behind them.
They turned to
see Vick Crane lying half-buried in the undergrowth.
“Please,” he
said. “Don’t leave me here for them to find me.”
Rawl turned
away.
“Just finish
me,” Crane pleaded.
Rawl took a step
back towards the path.
“Please,” Crane
said.
Rawl took
another step. Josie said nothing and she faced the same direction as Rawl
but she did not move. Rawl took another step.
“Wait,” Josie
said.
Rawl turned to
her.
“We have to help
him.”
“Help him?” Rawl
said. “He tried to kill us.”
“We can’t just
leave him here.”
“Then go and
wait with Paul and the others,” Rawl said, stepping back towards Crane.
“I’ll be along in a minute.”
“You can’t do
that, Rawl.”
“Sure I
can. He’s asking for it. He’s been asking for it for days.”
“Dane wouldn’t like
it.”
“Dane?
Since when have you cared about what Dane would
or wouldn’t like?”
“It’s not
right.”
Rawl was angry
at Crane; he was angry at Josie for defending him; and he was angry at having
to talk, which was excruciating. “Not right? It’s justice.
For all we know he’s the one who shot Tipper.”
“Tipper’s going
to be fine.”
“Please just get
on with it,” Crane said. “They’ll be coming for me now that I failed
them.”
“Fine,” Rawl
said to Josie. “You three get Tipper back to the fort and bring help.”
“What about
you?”
“I’ll wait with
Crane.”
“Rawl, don’t…”
“I said get
going,” Rawl said.
Josie waited a
moment longer, looking from one man to the other. Rawl wouldn’t meet her
eyes. Finally, she turned and walked back through the brush to the
others.
When she was
gone, Rawl picked up his bow and loaded it. He stood there, looking down
at Crane.
“Just do it,”
Crane said. “They’re coming for me. Taking me back to the fort
won’t help me.
Won’t help any of us.”
Rawl’s eyes
flickered to Smith’s hunched form and then back to Crane. He turned and
began to walk away.
“Don’t leave
me,” Crane called. “Please, don’t leave me.”
Rawl ignored
him. He walked several paces away until Crane was out of sight. He
sat down on a rotting log and set his bow beside him and he buried his face in
his hands and wept.
It seemed only a
short time later he heard the rumble of cart wheels. He figured he should
stand and hail them but he stayed where he was. He wiped his face with
his sleeve. The cart passed on.
Soon it returned
and Rawl heard it halt on the trail nearby. He walked out to it to find
Paul and Dane and Josie and several others. They had already been to the
beach and loaded the nets on the cart. Rawl led Paul to where Crane
lay. His brother paused looking at Rundal’s twisted form. They laid
a cloak out on the ground and shifted Crane onto it. As they lifted
Crane, Paul nodded towards the figure doubled over nearby. “Is that
Smith?”
Rawl made no
answer and they walked back to the cart in silence.
“Why are you
helping me?” Crane asked.
“Don’t ask me,”
Paul said.
“They’ll only
kill you for helping me.”
“Shut up before
we change our minds,” Paul said, setting him roughly down on the bed of nets.
When they
reached the fort, Dane wanted to install Crane in the holding cell.
“But he’s
wounded,” Josie said.
“Leech can treat
him just as well in there,” Dane said.
“You know that’s
not true,” said Leech, who’d come out of the infirmary when the cart rolled
through the gate.
“Put him in the
infirmary,” said Tipper, walking up, rather stiff-leggedly. “Not even the
four of them could keep me in there long, so he can have my bed.”
Seeing Tipper
walking seemed to change everyone’s mind more than any argument could have.
As soon as Crane
was on the bed in the infirmary, Dane had him made fast to it by having a rope
tied around his waist and knotted under the bed. He had a second rope
looped loosely around Crane’s neck and secured to one of the legs of the
bed.
Leech treated
his wounds as gently as he treated anyone’s.
“Why did you
attack them,” Dane asked as Leech worked.
Crane did not
say anything but only stared at the opposite wall.
“Answer me,”
Dane said.
Crane took a
deep breath. “I don’t want to talk about it, sir,” he said. “It was
what they told us to do.”
“What do you
mean?” Dane said.
“They sent them
to kill Mara,” Rawl said.
Dane turned to
him.
“Tell them,”
Rawl said to Crane.
Crane said
nothing, which was answer enough.
“Why?” Dane
asked.
“I don’t know,”
Crane said. “It’s just what they wanted.”
“They’re afraid
of her,” Paul said.
Dane looked at
him.
“Didn’t you hear
them screaming when she came through the gate yesterday?” Paul asked.
“I thought,”
Crane said, and everyone turned to him. “I thought that if we did what
they said, they would let the rest of us go.”
“You four, you
mean?” Dane said.
“No, all of us,”
Crane said, indicating those standing around him with a shake of his head.
“All of us, huh?
And how many of us would you have
killed so you could get to her and save your own sorry hide?” Dane asked.
“I’m sorry,
sir,” Crane said. “We weren’t thinking clearly. We were all so
frightened.”
“Frightened?”
Rawl said, lunging forward. Dane put an arm out to restrain him.
“You were frightened? You think that’s an excuse? You don’t think
every last of us is as frightened as he’s ever been?” He pulled away from
Dane and spoke his final words to the wall in a lowered voice. “I have
nightmares all night long and then I wake up and my days are worse than the
dreams.” He turned and went out the door.
“You’re a coward
and a fool, Crane,” Dane said. “Maybe I’m a fool to let you live.”
“They won’t let
me live long,” Crane said, speaking to the wall once more. “I failed
them.”
“You failed a
lot of people,” Dane said and headed out the door.
Rawl was
standing just outside the infirmary watching some of the men apply the last of
the nets. Dane stepped up beside him and fixed his gaze on the sentry
above the south gate.
“You have
nightmares, too, huh?”
Rawl
sniffed. “Captain,” he said without taking his eyes from the workers,
“Every morning I wake up, I thank Kran for one thing.”
“What’s that?”
Rawl turned his
face towards him as he started for the wall. “That I have yet to
piss my pants.”
Shortly after Dane left, Crane found
himself
alone in the infirmary. Alone, that is,
save for the stone-still form of the priest on the bed across from him.
Sore and tired as he was, he soon drifted off to sleep.
Out of the dark
silence of slumber they came to him. They did not come alone. They
dragged Gundar with them, struggling and pleading. Gundar, the one who
had escaped Rawl’s bolts for something far worse.
Had there been
anyone in the room to hear Crane dreaming, they would have found the whimpers
he made almost as unbearable as what the dark things were doing to
Gundar. And they held Crane’s gaze and made him watch.
When they let
the last, lifeless pieces of Gundar fall to the ground, they reached for him.
Crane sat bolt
upright in bed. He hardly noticed the shooting pain in his
shoulder. He had awakened to the barking of the dogs.
***
After Rawl
walked away to help finish with the nets, Dane heard a familiar voice behind
him. He turned to see Mirela, followed by Josie, emerge from the
armory. Mirela wore a helmet, a knife was strapped to her waist, and she
carried a shield.
“You look
adorable,” Dane said.
She stuck out
her tongue at him.
“Even better,”
he said.
When she had
first told him she wanted to be on the wall he had only shaken his head.
“You still think
I’m afraid of dying?” she said.
It wasn’t that
he thought she was afraid of dying. It was that he knew he was afraid of
the thought of her dying.
“You think it
would be better for me to crouch in some corner? What do you think they
do to the ones they take alive? Do you think I want to wait around to
find out?”
In the end he’d
forced himself to relent. Not because of her words but because he’d
promised himself he’d give her all the freedom he could. He had not
guessed how that freedom would terrify him.
Josie wore a
helmet, padded with extra wool to keep it from slipping, and the mail shirt
Rawl had won. Her knife and quiver were at her hip and she cradled her
repeater with
a certain
affection.
“Ever used a
blade before?” Dane asked Mirela.
“I’ve cleared
jungle that makes this island look like a picnic ground with nothing but a bush
knife.”
“But the jungle
didn’t fight back,” Dane said.
***
The men had just
finished tying the last of the nets to the anchor poles when the dogs began to
bark.
“Here we go
again,” Paul said.
Rawl, standing
beside him, suddenly remembered something from the day before. There was
hardly need for him to have remembered, for the man he thought of, Aaron, was
making
himself
heard.
“Get me out of
here,” he
pleaded,
his hands on the bars of the
cell. “Get me out of here. I’ll fight. I’ll die on the
walls. Just don’t leave me in here.”
Dane and Bailus
beat Rawl and Paul to the cell door. Rawl held his breath. Only
Dane could decide Aaron’s fate. Dane looked at Bailus. Bailus
nodded. Dane turned to Rawl and Paul. “Get him out and get him
armed.” He turned back to the cell. “As soon as you’re ready, get
up on the wall. You’re with me.”
Rawl felt a
strange sense of relief as he slammed the door open and hurried Aaron to the
armory.
Dane and Mirela
ran to the infirmary. Molly and the boy were there, as were Leech and
Owen and Lane. Owen, whose head was bothering him, had lain back down but
was sitting up now.
Crane was
straining against his bonds. “Let me loose. Please let me
loose. You can kill me if you want, but don’t leave me tied up here
waiting for them.”
“Forget it,”
Dane said.
Mirela grabbed
Dane’s arm. “Let him go,” she said. “His crime was against me.”
“Then you should
know we can’t trust him,” Dane said, pulling his arm free.
She took his arm
again and forced him to look at her. “I’m not asking you to give him a
weapon, but if my judgment means anything to you, cut him loose.”
Dane turned to
Crane. He glanced around the room. Everyone was watching him.
He drew his knife and in two strokes cut Crane’s bonds. “Don’t make me
regret this,” Dane said.
“Yes, sir,”
Crane said. But he had already decided what he would do.
Dane picked up
Owen’s bow, which sat by his bed, loaded it, and handed it back to him.
“Keep an eye on him,” he said.
“Don’t worry,”
Owen said. “If he so much as sits up I’ll nail him right back down
again.”
Dane and Mirela
stepped into the courtyard. The dogs continued to bark and whine.
They, and most of the men, were already on the wall.
The
shriken
came. Massing in the meadow but also surrounding the entire settlement as
they had the day before. They dragged Gundar with them. They did
many of the things to him Crane had seen them do in his dream, but they did
them quickly. When they were finished, they held up his head towards the
watchers. Then the
shriken
which held his head hurled it in a long
arc at the wall. This time there were no other preliminaries. While
Gundar’s head was still in the air, they charged.
The nets worked
brilliantly at first. The
shriken
, who had doubtlessly spent
days
studying the fortress, seemed to pay no attention to
the new additions until their first wave smashed into them. The creatures
were hurled back to earth, where they landed in tangled heaps to be shot by the
men on the walls. Others became caught in the nets as they tried to
scurry up the walls and these were just as easy to kill.
But they learned
all too quickly. Vaulting up the walls, they sprang for the poles that
supported the nets. They climbed along these upside-down until they were
clear of the nets. Then they swung their weight up and perched-crouched
there on the ends of the poles to launch themselves in great acrobatic arcs, up
and over the wall and onto the walkway. Then the men and women of the
expedition were fighting for their lives.
As the first
shriken
hit the walls, the boy thrust himself loose of Molly’s arms and ran out the
door of the infirmary. Molly gave a cry and disappeared out the door
herself. Lane followed her. Leech moved to the open door. He
was about to shut it when he saw Will Thatcher, Molly’s husband,
receive
a cut to the leg from one of the first attackers
over the wall. Will’s partner killed the
shriken,
but Will was
rolling around on the wall-walk with his hands pressed to his leg. Leech
could see red pouring out between his fingers. “Stay here,” he shouted to
Owen.
Leech grabbed a
bundle of bandages from the table and disappeared through the door. So it
was that Owen and Crane were left alone.
Crane knew his
chance had come. He pushed himself into a sitting position and swung his
legs off the bed.
“What are you
doing?” Owen said, bringing up his crossbow.
Crane stood,
wobbled, but kept his balance. “Give me your bow, Owen” he said.
“You come one
step closer and I’ll give you more of it than you want.”
“I failed
them. I know what I have to do. If you’re not going to help me,
give me your bow.”
Owen swung the
bow around, but it was too late. Crane lunged forward and, with his
injured arm, blocked the bow. With his good hand, he struck out, knocking
Owen’s hand back from the trigger. The two men leaned against each other
grappling, Crane the more hurt but above Owen and able to use his weight.
A moment later,
Crane staggered out of the door of the infirmary with Owen’s bow in hand.
He paused in the doorway, surveying the scene. He nearly gave up right
there. The wall was crawling with
shriken
. More were hurling
themselves over it every second. Some of these landed on their feet on
free spaces of the wall-walk. Others threw themselves, and the full force
of their spring, straight at the defenders. Crane watched as one pounced
on Pratt and the two figures tumbled into the courtyard together.
Crane’s eyes
scanned the battle until he found Mirela. She was ducking and dodging,
bringing her shield up over her head and striking with her knife from
underneath it. Josie and the Johnson twins fought beside her. They
were all still on their feet. Crane saw there was no point in trying to
get to her.
Then Crane
spotted Dane. Whoever Dane’s partner had been, he was lying on the wall,
dead or dying. Crane remembered Dane’s last words to him. He
started towards him. His wounded leg felt like it was made of wood, wood
which had been thrust into a fire, and his shoulder throbbed. Every step
seemed more impossible than the last. As he approached the ladder that
stood just to the left of Dane’s position, he saw Dane smash his axe through a
shriken’s
chest. But something was wrong. Dane was jerking and dragging the
body around. His axe was caught in the creature’s ribcage. Dane
released the axe and drew his knife as another creature came over the
wall.
Facing an enemy whose reach far exceeded his,
with only a knife.
Crane knew it might make no difference whether
he got to Dane or not.
He started up
the ladder. He had thought walking was an agony. He would have
walked a mile rather than go up one more rung of that ladder. But he was
driven on like a man possessed. Before climbing, he removed the bolt and
clenched it between his teeth. He held the crossbow in his bad hand,
which hung limply at his side. He threw his good hand up to the highest
rung he could reach and let his weight hang on his extended arm. He
stepped up with his good leg, keeping his bad leg locked at the knee.
Then he pulled with his arm and pushed with his leg and pulled the stiff leg up
onto the rung. He worried he might break the bolt in half between his
grinding teeth.
Owen crawled out
of the door of the infirmary on his belly. He cursed himself for letting
Crane best him, but as they’d struggled, Owen’s head had begun to throb and the
room had started spinning. He’d come to to find Crane and his crossbow
gone. Still woozy, he dropped out of bed and crawled to the door.
From the doorway he saw it all. He saw Mirela duck, bringing up her
shield against the blow of a flail and saw Paul cut the legs out from under her
attacker. He saw Tipper lying on the battlement. His dog, Dioji,
raged about his fallen master. The dog threw itself against the chest of
the nearest
shriken
and the two rolled across the wall-walk, then Dioji
was up and tearing into the leg of the next
shriken
. The
shriken
fell to its knees and Dioji leapt at its throat. There was a spray of
rich, red blood and the creature folded back on itself. As Dioji wheeled
on the next enemy, Owen thought the dog’s eyes
glowed
a deeper red than the blood which had spurted from the
shriken’s
torn
neck. Owen saw Bailus swinging his hammer like a windmill blade. In
one twirl he deflected a blow and knocked the attacking
shriken
against
the wall. The next twirl brought the hammerhead smashing down on its
skull. Owen doubted a meteorite hurtling out of heaven could have made a
bigger crater.
Or a bigger mess.
Then he spotted
Crane.
Just reaching the top of the ladder and rolling
over onto the wall.
Dane’s back was turned to him. Owen
screamed a warning, but it was lost in the clamor of battle.
As Crane pulled
himself onto the wall and rose to his feet, Dane thrust his knife at the
shriken
in front of him. The creature dodged and dealt Dane such a blow with its
flail that he spun half around and his blade flew from his hand. Crane
slipped the bolt into the drawn bow. As Dane staggered to regain his
footing, his eyes met Crane’s. He did not try to dodge but turned so that
he fully faced Crane, as though he preferred to die by the hand of a man, even
the hand of a traitor, than one of these fiends. Crane, who could barely
stand, had no breath for words. “Move,” he gasped.
Dane did, just
in time. Crane brought up the bow and sent the bolt home through the
shriken’s
chest just as it was bringing down its sickle. It spun around and dropped
off the battlement. Even as it fell, another came over the wall with it
sickle already raised. The sickle fell in an arc towards Dane’s
back. Crane lunged forward. The sickle’s blade entered his
stomach. Before the
shriken
could draw its weapon back, Crane’s
good hand locked around its wrist. He flung his other arm around the
creature’s back and pulled it to him. His shoulder felt like it was
tearing loose at the socket. He released his grip on the creature’s wrist
and threw his good arm around it, pinning its arms to its sides. He could
feel the beat of the heart through the fragile ribs.
How had he ever
feared these creatures?
He squeezed as hard as he could. His
hope had been to crush the thing in his arms but he found he lacked the
strength. The creature was struggling horribly. The beak gouged
Crane’s bad shoulder, cut his cheek. He swung the monster around against
a low cutout in the wall. He surged his weight upwards and
forwards. As he teetered on the wall with his enemy pinned beneath him,
his eyes met Dane’s briefly. Dane grabbed his arm but his hand, slick
with blood, slipped. Crane, holding the creature in a death-grip, fell
forward and over the wall. Their bodies spun once in the air so that
Crane’s body landed heavily on the
shriken’s
.
Dane leaned over
the wall to look at the two lifeless forms tangled there and, in that moment,
heard behind him the awful screams of the creatures. They were the same
screams he had heard yesterday. There was a sound of utter hate and loss
in them. He turned back to the courtyard. The creatures were
retreating as they had the day before. One of them passed so close to him
he could have reached out and touched it. They disappeared beneath the
eaves of the forest, and the sounds of their screams died away behind them.