Chapter Fourteen Felnir
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Felnir
“Die, Liar King! DIE!”
Felnir winced as the axe blade bit into the edge of his shield, sending a salvo of splinters into his forehead.
Pain added force and swiftness to his counter blow, hacking at the axe wielder’s legs while raising his shield and lunging to force him back.
Pitching him from the battlement, Felnir heard more defiance than pain in the fellow’s scream.
It ended when the axe man landed amid a dense knot of his comrades, finding himself spitted on their upraised spears.
Felnir ducked behind a crenellation to avoid the near instant volley of arrow and slingshot that greeted any defender of the Aryngyr who showed a face to their besiegers.
Looking to his left and right, he took satisfaction from finding no more attackers on the battlement, at least none alive.
“How are there any of these bastards left?” Tyrheld groaned, pulling her dagger clear of a slain foemen’s neck.
Beyond her, other warriors finished off wounded enemies or helped stricken comrades bind their cuts.
From the other side of the wall came a now familiar chorus as the survivors of this latest assault retreated.
“Death to the Liar King!” and various allusions to the carnal exploits of their opponents’ mothers were the loudest, apart from the screams of the dying.
Although a veteran of many sieges, Felnir had never before found himself defending a keep instead of storming it.
He decided being on this side of the wall was worse.
Added to the recurrent bouts of combat required to beat back the assaults of the Silver Dove’s irksomely courageous warriors, there was the wearying tension of the lull.
In between tides, watches needed to be maintained lest their foes attempt a seaborne assault.
Most worrisome from Felnir’s perspective was their fast diminishing food stocks.
Water wasn’t a problem since, in addition to the frequent rain, the Aryngyr featured a deep well.
But the Silver Dove had proven to be nothing if not a cunning enemy.
Having lured Felnir into taking her most prized holdfast, she had also emptied its larders.
Before the tide closed in on the first night of their entrapment, Felnir had ordered the horses gathered from the causeway.
It proved a difficult business. Many of the beasts had fled, panicked by the storm, Bolt among them.
His mount was fearless in battle but proved a coward when faced with nature’s wrath.
Felnir hoped one of his warriors on the southern shore would have the sense to keep hold of the horse for him.
Only about a third of the remaining horses could be calmed enough to be led into the keep by which time the first of the Silver Dove’s ships had disgorged its cargo of warriors upon the causeway.
Luckily, their first assault had been a rushed affair delivered in numbers too small to force the swiftly shorn-up gate, though the cost of beating them back had been high.
Felnir had taken the Aryngyr with close to six thousand warriors.
By his best reckoning, he now commanded at most two-thirds that number.
The only crumb of comfort was that it meant he had fewer mouths to feed.
“Archers up!” Felnir barked, rising and striding along the battlement. “Clear the ladders.”
Every failed assault was followed by a period of duelling between their own archers and the enemy as the defenders went about pushing away the ladders still propped against the wall.
In addition to some skilled bowmen, it transpired that the folk of northern Vorunvahl had a tradition of learning the sling from an early age.
These fleet-footed, keen-eyed slingers would lurk among the rock-covered slope below the wall, always ready to cast their pellets at any available target.
A dozen of Felnir’s menda had fallen to their attentions and an equal number were now lacking an eye.
Consequently, the chore of clearing the ladders was done swiftly amid a chorus of profanity punctuated by the hard smack of lead on stone.
“That’s quite a haul, my lord,” Falk said when Felnir reached his side.
The outlaw crouched at a peephole carved into the base of a crenellation.
Moving aside, he allowed Felnir to make out the sprawl of twitching or still bodies littering the track all the way down to the causeway.
Some had been lying there since the first abortive assault and the stink was beginning to thicken.
Moving back, Felnir risked a brief glance over the wall at the bedraggled groups of warriors making their way along the causeway to the waiting boats.
Each day had followed the same grim routine since the arrival of the Silver Dove’s fleet.
When the ebbing morning tide drew the sea back to reveal the rough stone pathway, the ships anchored off shore would send forth their many boats, all crammed with warriors.
Yet, it had become quickly apparent to Felnir that they had neglected to bring enough boats.
So, even though the numbers they threw at the wall each day were sizeable, they lacked the strength to overwhelm the Aryngyr’s defences in one blow.
The Silver Dove had laid her snare well, but lacked the means to draw it tight upon his neck.
“Careful, my lord!” Falk said as Felnir ducked a slingshot. The lead ball struck fragments from the granite barrier, sending grit across his face and reminding him of the splinters still embedded in his forehead.
“Change the watch,” he grunted, tugging the shards of wood from his skin. “Tell Vehldur to slaughter half the remaining horses.”
“Are you sure, my lord? Not so many left now.”
“I sense some impatience on the part of our enemy. They sent more today than yesterday. Stands to reason there’ll be more tomorrow and there’s few who fight well on an empty belly.” Felnir moved in a crouch to the stairs leading to the courtyard. “Find me in the vaults if you need me.”
The innards of the Aryngyr consisted of a plethora of tunnels and caves, some of which had been expanded into storage vaults.
In the first hours of the siege Felnir ordered them searched for any scrap of food, to no avail.
They did discover a fulsome stock of wine but he commanded the casks be sundered and the contents drained.
Perhaps the Silver Dove hadn’t poisoned it all, but he wasn’t prepared to risk it, nor allow his menda the dangerous comfort of drunkenness.
However, while the search failed to uncover any supplies, it did reveal something of interest in the deepest reaches of the holdfast’s bowels.
A hundred feet into the rock, the expanded vaults gave way to a series of smaller caverns.
These were evidently the work of human labour, but far older.
Also, unlike the bare walls of the storage vaults, they were decorated in designs Felnir had come to recognise.
As he made his way to the deepest cavern, the light of his torch played over the many spirals, and other more complex designs, etched into the rock.
They all echoed the carvings he had first noticed at the stone circle in the river lands, and the more elaborate decorations of the abandoned settlements in the Craggens.
The Aryngyr, like much of the more impressive constructions he had so far encountered in this land, had been built atop the remnants of something far older.
The sound of Wohtin’s muttering reached him before he entered the cavern.
This one was the most extensively carved of all the caverns, the designs covering its walls so dense that they overlapped in places.
It also differed from the others by featuring depictions of people and animals, and smaller indentations in the stone Felnir took to be some form of writing.
“Denhild…” Wohtin murmured, holding a small oil lamp closer to a section of carved stone.
Felnir hadn’t known this ancient soul had followed the advance across the causeway until discovering him in these caverns.
When asked why he hadn’t remained in the more secure environs of the menda encamped on the southern bank of the Kahl Ledda, the old man had merely shrugged and mumbled something about curiosity.
“The goddess of the Lower Hall who watches over healers,” Felnir said, peering over Wohtin’s shoulder at the carving. To his eye it was a meaningless jumble of intersecting lines and that unknowable script. “Strange you should find mention of her here, is it not?”
“It would be,” Wohtin agreed. “If I had, since the Kearling knew nothing of our gods. But I have not. This, I believe—” he tapped a bony finger to a cluster of indentations in the stone “—is a representation of the constellation we know as Denhild’s Cup.
And this.” The digit moved to a more dense collection of marks.
“Is the word for stars, or perhaps sky. I haven’t decided yet. ”
“You can truly read this?”
“Some.” Wohtin moved along the wall, hand exploring the carvings.
“It began to come back to me when I first beheld the Aryngyr. As you know, my mind is a parsimonious miser that rarely gives up its treasure. But, upon seeing this keep again, I remembered the wealth of carvings it contained, and the fact that I had some understanding of their meaning.”
“How? The Kearling were wiped out, were they not?”
“As far as I remember. But if I can comprehend their writings, then a few must have lived long enough to teach it to me.” He paused as his fingers twitched upon another symbol.
It resembled an elongated oval with a small spiral carved at the top.
“This…” Wohtin let out a small gasp of realisation.
“This is their version of what the Albermaine-ish call a compass. See how it’s angled, pointing north towards Denhild’s Cup. ”
“A map?”
“Of a kind.”
“To what?” Felnir raised an eyebrow. “Treasure?”