Chapter 39 #2
Another horn blast sounded from the city. The banners of the attacking army—red, yellow, blue and mauve—spread out before the city gates.
‘Ifan gave orders for the city to surrender,’ the captain of the archers said—a reassurance to himself and his men.
Fola wondered how many of them had lovers, children, friends or parents still in those distant houses.
‘They’ll let the young and infirm leave now, to escape the fighting in the streets.
They’re still the prince’s subjects, after all. ’
‘As were you, until today,’ Colm observed.
The captain scowled. ‘They won’t have taken up arms.’
‘Can you say for sure that none in the city lent aid to the rebels of the Greenwood?’ Colm asked. ‘Owyn may hold them all complicit.’
The captain was silent. His face fell.
‘Owyn isn’t cruel,’ Fola insisted, though she had had only two meetings with the lad. ‘He’ll let them go.’
Colm only grunted.
Fola took a deep breath, steadying herself. The air was brisk, full of the rich scents of autumn. Earth, crushed leaves, rain, the first tinge of decay. Fear and sweat.
The day progressed.
The gates of the city were opened. There was some activity—movement of people.
From the tower, it might have been an exodus of non-combatants.
It might have been something else. Speculation passed among the archers, until their captain demanded silence.
Orders might be shouted or blown by trumpet at any time.
At the noon hour, the fires began.
Timber-framed houses went up like torches. Shingled roofs gouted flame, and then collapsed. The roar of the burning reached them, muted by distance. No less terrible.
‘A good sign, I think,’ Colm said. ‘If they did not intend to let the common folk live, they would have put the city to the torch the moment they were through the gates.’
But it did mean Owyn had no more interest in talk. Now, Glascoed would burn, blood would flow, and another legion of the dead would join in Ynyr’s haunting.
Trumpet blasts sounded through the smoke. The captain shouted a brisk order. His men took their positions at the crenellations, their arrows nocked, ready to draw. Colm stood beside them, the wry smile replaced with a hard readiness that Fola scarcely recognised.
Her hands were trembling. She tried to still them. If she drew the wrong line, the wrong rune, the spells she had prepared would fail—or worse, land among Glascoed’s defenders.
What would Arno say? she wondered absently, as the flames grew nearer, the smoke thicker. An image of the archivist came to mind, shaking his hairless head, rolling his eyes, telling her she had grown far, far too involved.
An easy perspective to take from an office above the Labyrinthine Library, secluded from the wider world.
She was here, now, with the smoke stinging her eyes and plenty of reasons to fight.
To win Siwan’s trust, and bring her back to the City in triumph.
To help the people of the Greenwood, who deserved a life lived on their own terms, and the ghosts of their ancestors, who deserved justice.
To save her own bloody hide—the most direct and needful of reasons, as she caught flashes of armoured forms moving through the city streets towards the gate of the outer palisade wall. So close, now. Not yet close enough.
Calbog’s contraption groaned and Colm’s bow snapped, a sound that made Fola jump.
His arrow carved through smoke. Through the billowing dark, Fola watched the shot smash through a column of spearmen, skewering three bodies like chunks of meat over a cooking fire.
Screams sounded, chilling her blood. Colm grunted in satisfaction and reached for another arrow.
Lights burst from the square before the palisade wall, red and yellow flares against the billowing smoke. A series of sharp cracks rolled like thunder.
‘Forgardian hand-cannoneers,’ the captain of the archers said, then spat in distaste. He pointed towards the origin of the sound and the flaring lights. ‘Nock! Draw! Loose!’
Twelve arrows arced over the walls and fell. There were screams, but there were always screams now. Fola squinted against the stinging in her eyes, but could see nothing that spoke to the success of the archers’ volley, even as the captain bellowed orders and they fired another.
Is all battle like this? A blind, violent flailing in the smoke and fog?
Another sudden flare, roll of thunder, and now the splintering of wood, and the gate of the palisade fell.
Fighters, some with tabards spattered in blood, surged through the opening.
Arrows fell in a constant stream from the curtain wall and its towers; the captain gave no more orders, only launched arrows alongside his men into the onrushing mass.
Colm’s arrows fell, too, each one pinning a handful of unfortunate souls to the earth.
The chill that gripped Fola deepened, and she felt a certainty that Glascoed would lose the day.
‘Whatever you mean to do, you’d best do it,’ Colm said, launching another arrow. It found the neck of a slight figure in loose-fitting armour—a youth, little more than a girl or a boy, in the mauve and yellow of Afondir. The man-at-arms behind the youth fell with its head pinned to his thigh.
Fola’s stomach churned. She forced herself to look away.
Two lines of soldiers in bright armour and plumed helms arrayed themselves across from the gate of the curtain wall. They held weapons like ships’ cannon braced on wooden poles. Others stood in front of them with tall, thick shields.
The hand-cannoneers fired, hurling a cloud of smoke and flame at the gates. The roar of the guns pounded at Fola’s ears, followed by the splintering of wood.
The captain of the archers paused to point. ‘Target them!’
Arrows bit deep into shields. One of Colm’s punched through the nearest, knocking the man who held it to the ground.
The screams and stamping of terrified horses rose from the courtyard just beyond the curtain wall.
Why horses? Not a question Fola could hope to answer, ignorant of warfare as she was.
She pawed through her pad of spellpaper, mind reeling, focusing on the circles, the runes, the lines.
While she searched, the hand-cannons launched another volley.
There! She leaned beside Colm to peer between two crenellations.
Arrows clattered against the stone to either side of her.
Frog squawked and leapt down from her shoulder, flattening himself in the midst of the archers.
Fola winced as a flying chip of stone cut her cheek and tried to estimate the distance—in the chaos and confusion, she second-guessed herself.
A delay that gave time enough for a third volley.
The gate shuddered and groaned. Soldiers—hundreds, now—streamed across the killing field, some bearing ladders that they raised against the curtain wall.
The hand-cannoneers reloaded their guns and levelled them.
Three lines, and a fourth to complete the circle.
Spellpaper flashed to silver flame. A tremor shook the earth.
The ground beneath the hand-cannoneers burst apart in a geyser of stone.
Bodies tumbled through the air, some hurled as high as the top of the curtain wall before falling back to earth.
New screams joined the chorus of battle.
Some of the hand-cannoneers, caught only by the edge of the explosion, struggled back to their feet, reaching for discarded guns, fumbling to reload and reset.
A small act, but terrible. Fola stared at the twisted limbs and broken earth with churning nausea.
Hatred spread like a venom through her mind—for herself, for the fighters she had killed and wounded, for Owyn and Ifan and the other lords of this nightmare realm, for all the wider world and all of its deep, bloodstained history.
The gate of the curtain wall groaned open, just wide enough for two men to ride abreast. A shout went up, and four blasts from a silver trumpet, then cheers from the defenders.
Ifan, Count of Glascoed, waving the plain sword of a man-at-arms, rallied a charge of twenty armoured men on horseback into the staggered hand-cannoneers.
Lances darted. Swords flashed. Men and horses screamed in the spray of blood.
Ifan’s charge broke the pride of Forgard, then veered to the left, riding down the length of the killing field, carving through ranks of men awaiting their turn at the ladders.
Another twenty, led by Gavron and the cyclops Calbog, followed through the gap and rounded to the right.
Together, they shattered the momentum of the prince’s assault.
‘Well done,’ Colm said, reaching for another arrow.
Fola shook her head, fighting sickness, feeling as though she was watching the tumult and horror from a point hovering behind her body. The horrors of Ulun and the reaching arms of wraiths at the festival grounds had troubled her, but not broken her as this did.
‘I didn’t know what Ifan was planning,’ she heard herself say.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Colm said. ‘You were there, in the right moment. They were waiting for the gates to crack. It would have been a desperate action, then. A last bloodletting before their final retreat to the keep. Now, instead, the walls still stand. See? They’re wheeling back around.
The gates will open, let them through, and close again to hold a while longer. ’
‘I could just have easily cast the spell at the wrong moment and snapped the legs of Ifan’s horse.’
‘But you didn’t.’ Colm loosed his arrow and shrugged. ‘So it goes, in battle.’
Fola watched Ifan’s knights pull back behind the gate, followed by Gavron’s—of the forty who had ridden out, eight did not return.
More would have died if not for her spell.
Fewer, though, on the Parwysh side of the battle, she thought, her gaze drifting to the bloody ruin Ifan had left in his wake.
It was difficult, for her, this valuing of some lives over others because of a conflict, a banner, an idea. Particularly so, it seemed, when her side was winning.
A morose thought. She reached for her spellpaper, began searching for the next circle to cast while trying to find again that firm belief in her purpose here and in the rightness of the Greenwood’s cause.
Frog chirruped and fluttered his wings. A sharp scream split the air. One that Fola knew well—had been listening for all this time, over the clash of steel and the wails of the dying. Like that of an eagle, but louder, to carry over the battlefield.
The questions of the battle—of its brutality and carnage, and the right and wrong of it—became suddenly meaningless.