Honor among thieves

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Berserkers crashed up against the gate, straining and howling as they tried to bend the bars of the portcullis with their bare hands. Croy was afraid they just might do it, even though those bars were solid iron two inches thick.

High above his head he heard the ballistae twanging and jumping. They were too slow-barely able to get four shots off in a minute. “Archers!” he shouted. “Get longbowmen up there-drive the host back.” He glanced at the berserkers at the gate. “And men with pikestaffs. Clear the gate!”

Sir Hew was a dozen yards away, bellowing his own orders at a huddle of serjeants in leather jack. When Croy came running toward him, the knight dismissed the serjeants and shook his head. “Most of the men are still in their billets, and will be until someone comes to collect them. We weren’t ready-didn’t expect the attack until tomorrow’s dawning.”

“No time for cursing fate now,” Croy said. “We need to-”

An arrow came down from straight above and knocked Chillbrand out of Hew’s hand. Croy looked up-it was as if the arrow had been dropped from the clouds.

A hundred more of them appeared as he watched.

“They’re lobbing arrows over the wall, in the hopes of hitting anyone defending the gate,” Croy said as the shafts twisted down toward him. He ducked and threw his shield over his head. The arrows struck him like wooden raindrops, with about as much effect. He started to laugh, thinking the barbarians had wasted their ammunition. Then he looked up and saw a soldier in canvas jack standing before him. The man looked deeply confused by the three arrows that had transfixed his chest. The soldier took a step toward Croy and started screaming.

Croy grabbed the man and laid him down on the side of the road, out of the way of trampling feet. Not that it mattered. The soldier was dead before Croy set him down. All around, other soldiers were screaming or running willy-nilly, trying to get out of the barrage.

Up on the wall one of the ballistae slumped over on its side. Its master fell from the battlements, an arrow through one of his eyes. Balint watched him fall, then screamed for a replacement. “One that can fucking aim properly!” she added.

“Archers!” Croy shouted again. “Where are our archers?”

He heard a great crash and a noise like a bell falling from its tower. He looked up and saw that the barbarians had a battering ram in the shape of a giant iron skull and were slamming it again and again against the portcullis.

“Hew!” Croy shouted.

“I know it, brother. Back! Everyone get back-retreat to the inner bailey. We can’t hold the gate. Retreat! Sound the retreat!”

Sir Orne was suddenly at Croy’s elbow. “The king? What of him?”

Croy could only shake his head. He didn’t know where the king had been taken.

“He can’t be lost yet. I am certain he’ll outlive me, anyway,” Orne said. “Help Sir Rory-he looks like he can barely stand.”

The oldest of the Ancient Blades had slumped against a wall not ten feet away. Crowsbill dangled from his gauntleted hand as if he might drop it at any moment. Croy took it from him and put it in its sheath on Rory’s belt.

“Thank you, brother,” Rory said. He slurred the words as if he were drunk. Croy checked his wound and saw gore clotted and thick under the gap in his steel armor. What kind of man could cut through steel plate and chain mail with an iron axe? The berserkers must be stronger than giants when they entered their trance.

“How is it?” Rory asked. For a moment his face showed no courage at all, just the desperate fear of a man who knows he will die soon. Then his lips pressed together under his mustache. “It doesn’t feel too bad,” he blustered.

Croy nodded slowly. Even if Rory survived, even if the wound didn’t fester, he’d never use his arm again. “It’s just your left arm,” he said, knowing what Rory needed to hear. “You can still wield your Blade.”

“Hah!” Rory said, and tried to laugh. Mostly he just wheezed. “We’ll show ’em yet, won’t we, Croy, we’ll-”

He was interrupted by a sudden blare of noise. Trumpets sounding the retreat-but there was no need. A crowd of soldiers was already rushing up the high street toward the inner bailey, many of them throwing away their weapons as they ran.

“Cowards!” Sir Rory said, spitting up blood.

“Villeins, most of them,” Croy observed. Conscripts. Until ten days ago, for such men even holding a weapon was a crime. Now in less than a fortnight they’d been told they would have to take up arms in defense of their king. They hadn’t been given enough training. They had never fought before. “They’re scared.”

“We should hang every last one of the rotters,” Rory insisted.

Croy said nothing, but started to head up the high street himself, one shoulder under Rory’s good arm. He didn’t get more than twenty feet before Hew grabbed his sword hand.

“Croy, the king-”

Croy shook his head. “No one seems to know where he is.”

“We must find him. He could be under the feet of this mob. He could be wounded and dying even now.”

Croy grimaced at the thought. “I’ll find him. You take Rory and get to the keep. Orne! Orne, are you here?”

The doomed knight came running.

“Orne,” Croy said, “we need to find the king.”

Orne sighed. “Yes, we do.”

Hew grabbed the side of Croy’s helm and pulled it around so they were looking in each other’s eyes. “Get him to safety. At any cost. That’s my command.”

“And I shall obey,” Croy said. Then he broke away and started running.

Panicked men were everywhere. Only a handful still carried their weapons. Some had even torn off their canvas jack and their kettle hats, perhaps thinking they would not be slaughtered if they didn’t look like soldiers. Croy tried to grab a few of them and tell them to get to the keep, that the only safety available lay there, but none of them listened. They were crowding into cellars or the upper floors of houses, barricading themselves in as if a few pieces of furniture or a locked door could keep out the barbarians.

It was tough to move through the fortress-town against the flow of that crowd. Once, Orne had to draw Bloodquaffer and wave it over his head to force the fleeing men to make room.

Before they covered a half dozen streets, they heard a rumbling groan and a shriek of tearing metal, and knew the portcullis had fallen. The barbarians had entered Helstrow.

“How long do you think Hew can hold the keep?” Orne asked.

“I don’t know,” Croy said between clenched teeth. He stepped out of the way of a cart full of men still holding their bill hooks. They looked scared but hadn’t deserted yet, so maybe they were headed for the fighting. “There’s food in the keep for months, and barrels of arrows, and the smithies… but this isn’t a siege. It’s a direct assault. If Hew gets enough men inside and locks the gates before the barbarians get to him, maybe a few days.”

“What of the queen, and their children?”

Croy pushed his way through a knot of soldiers on their knees, begging the Bloodgod for help. “They were sent to Greenmarsh days ago. You,” he shouted, and grabbed one of the praying men. “Did the king come through here?”

The man wouldn’t stop praying until Croy shook him. “I’ll ask again. Have you seen the king?”

“He’s not with you, Sir Knight?” the man asked, and his face dissolved in blubbering terror.

Croy pushed the wretch away and started to storm off when a woman leaned out of a window above his head and shouted for his attention.

“They went down there,” she said, and pointed to a narrow lane between two houses.

“Milady,” Croy said, “you have my thanks.”

“I’m no lady! But if you’d repay me, tell me-what should we do? I have six children up here and they want to know what all the noise is.”

Croy looked back toward the eastern gate, where he knew the fighting would be hot and desperate. For the moment at least his view was blocked by the intervening houses, but any minute now the berserkers would come flooding through this street, destroying everything in their path, murdering every man, woman, and child they met. He looked up again at the woman in the window and thought of what advice he could possibly give her.

“Please, Sir Knight. For my children’s sake?”

He closed his eyes and looked down. “Get to the keep, if you can. Stick as close to the western wall as possible-if you see anyone bloodied or screaming, run away. I’ll pray for you, goodwife.”

She slammed the shutters of the window without another word.

Croy and Orne hurried down the lane she’d indicated and saw a serjeant with an arrow sticking out of his back. He was breathing heavily and looked as pale as a sheet, but he waved them over when he saw them.

The serjeant led them down into a root cellar where the king lay on a bed of sackcloth. His eyes were closed and there was a bad bruise on his left temple. “Hasn’t… woken since I… brought him here,” the serjeant gasped.

Sir Orne grabbed the arrow in the man’s back and twisted it free, then shoved a piece of cloth into the wound. The serjeant winced until tears came from his eyes, but he would not cry out.

“You’re a good man,” Croy said, and put a hand on the serjeant’s shoulder.

“Get him… to Sir Hew… he’ll…” The serjeant said no more. He sat down on the close-packed earth of the floor and just stared at the ceiling.

Croy ran back up to the street and sought about until he found what he wanted-a pair of bill hooks with long enough hafts. With these and a bedsheet from an abandoned house, he made a litter that he and Orne could carry between them. They put the king on it and started to carry him up the stairs. “Come with us,” Croy said to the wounded serjeant.

But the man was dead, his eyes rolled back up into their sockets. Croy closed his eyelids, then went back to his burden.