Luthien's Gamble

13 Against the Wall

The next was not a bright dawn, the sky hazy gray with the first high clouds of yet another gathering storm. When shafts of sunlight did break through, the fields sparkled with wetness, as did the helms and shields and glistening speartips of the Avon army, forming into three huge squares, four to five thousand soldiers in each.

Luthien watched the spectacle from atop the low gatehouse of the city’s inner wall. He and his group had crawled in just ahead of the Avon force, leaving the cyclopians to set their camp on the field, for the one-eyes had met up with more minor resistance in the foothills between Felling Downs and Montfort. No groups had actually engaged the vast army; they had just stung the one-eyes enough to keep them diverted, allowing Luthien’s band to slip far to the south and cross the river, then dash back into the protection of the city as the night had deepened around them.

Before Luthien lay a hundred feet of empty ground, all structures and wagons having been removed by the dwarfs. The empty field ended at the lower outer wall, the base of which had been chopped and wedged, ready to drop outward, away from the city. Thick ropes pulled taut ran back into the courtyard, a third of the distance to the inner wall. These were pegged solidly into the ground, and beside each stood an ax-wielding dwarf.

Those dwarfs would have a long wait, Luthien hoped. The first defense would come from that outer wall; its low parapets were lined shoulder-to-shoulder by archers and pikemen. Luthien spotted Siobhan among that line, her long wheat-colored tresses hanging low out of a silvery winged helmet, her great longbow in hand.

The young Bedwyr next looked for Shuglin, but could not find the dwarf. In fact, Luthien saw none of the bearded folk, except for those twenty dwarfs ready to chop the lines and one or two in place along the outer wall. Luthien looked up and down his own line along the inner wall, but still, for some reason he did not understand, he found no dwarfs. He looked back to Siobhan instead, admiring her fierce beauty, her sheer strength of character. All those around looked to her for guidance as surely as they looked to the Crimson Shadow.

The whooshing sound of a catapult behind him, from the Ministry, brought the young man from his contemplations of the fair half-elf. He lifted his gaze beyond the outer wall and saw the three black and silver masses approaching, a row of solid metal, with shields butted together perhaps sixty-five fronting each of the squares. Oliver had warned Luthien that they would do this, calling the formations “testudos,” but no words could have prepared Luthien for the splendor of this sight. One testudo was directly north of the city, a second northwest, and the third almost directly west, a three-pronged attack that would pressure the two main outer walls. At least they weren’t surrounded, Luthien thought, but of course, Caer MacDonald could not easily be surrounded, since its southern and eastern sections flowed into the towering mountains, virtually impassable at this time of year.

Any relief that Luthien might have realized with that thought was lost as the Avon march progressed. The cyclopians came like a storm cloud, slowly, deliberately. Above the din of the march and the excitement along the wall, Luthien heard the cyclopian drummers striking a rhythmic, monotonous beat.

A heartbeat, continuous, inevitable.

A ball of flaming pitch hit the field in front of the brutes—some of those in the front rank were splattered. But their shields deflected the missiles and they never slowed.

A lump of panic welled in Luthien’s throat, a sudden urge to run away, out of Caer MacDonald’s back gate and into the mountains. He hadn’t foreseen that it would be like this, so controlled and determined. He had expected the cyclopian leader to make some announcement, expected some horns to blow, followed by a roaring charge.

This was too calculated, too confident. The Praetorian Guard held tight ranks; their line hardly fluttered as the next catapult shot hit in their midst. A few were killed or wounded—some had to have been—but the mass didn’t reveal any losses in the least, just rolled on to the cadence, continuous, inevitable. To Luthien, so, too, seemed the impending fall of Caer MacDonald.

Luthien glanced all around. All was suddenly quiet on his side of the wall, and he realized that the men and women around him were entertaining similar fears. A voice in Luthien’s head told him that it was time for him to be the leader, the true leader. The rebels had hit a critical moment before the battle had even been joined.

Luthien climbed to the top of the battlement and drew Blind-Striker from its scabbard. “Caer MacDonald!” he cried. “Eriador free!”

Those waiting behind the outer wall glanced back, some confused, but some, like Siobhan, knew and appreciated what the young Bedwyr was up to.

Luthien ran along the wall to the gatehouse on the other side of Caer MacDonald’s huge front gate. He continued his cry, and it became a chant, taken up by every soldier manning the city wall.

Those on the outer wall, with the enemy fast closing into range, did not cry out, but surely they were heartened by the cheering behind them. Up came the lines of bows, arrows fitted and ready.

The cyclopian army continued its slow and steady march. Fifty feet away. Forty.

Still Siobhan and her companions held their bows bent, seeing little to shoot at along the barricade of metal shields. Another catapult lob landed in the midst of the army, far back among the ranks, and then a ballista bolt, driving down from one of the Ministry’s towers, slammed into the front line, and no shield could hold it back. It buckled the blocking metal in half and blasted through, skewering one cyclopian, and the force of the hit knocked those brutes flanking him from their feet, causing a temporary break in the line.

The archers were quick to let fly and the stinging arrows penetrated the mass, taking their toll.

Barely twenty feet away, the cyclopian square at the northwest bend in the outer wall broke ranks and charged, screaming wildly. The bow strings hummed; pikemen jabbed down from their higher perches, trying to keep the brutes from the eight-foot barrier.

Siobhan, farther to the north with her elves, called for a volley before the square facing them even broke ranks. It was a calculated gamble, and one that paid off, for at close range the powerful elfish longbows drove arrows right through the blocking shields, and the elves were quick enough to fit their next arrows so that they fired again almost immediately.

A third and fourth volley followed before the cyclopians could finish closing the twenty feet, but as devastating as the bow fire was, it hardly dented the great mass, five thousand Praetorian Guards to this square alone. The brutes did not panic, did not weep for their fallen. They swarmed the wall and clambered up it, often climbing over the backs of their own dead.

Siobhan’s elves fought brilliantly—so did the folk, mostly humans, holding the northwestern corner and the western expanse—but their line was thin, far too thin, and in a matter of moments, the wall was breached in several places.

From the inner wall came three short blasts of a horn, and all on the outer wall who were able broke ranks and fled back for the city gate.

To their credit, those dwarfs ready with the axes waited until the very last moment, gave everyone fighting along the outer wall every possible second to get away. But then they could wait no more; cyclopians were inside the line and bearing down on them and if they did not put their axes to quick work on the ropes, they would find themselves engaged in close combat instead.

One by one, the ropes snapped, each with a huge popping sound, and the stones of the outer wall groaned.

Luthien held his breath; the wall seemed to hang in place for a long, long while, perhaps held up by the sheer bulk of the force on the other side. Finally, it tumbled, breaking from the west around to the north like a great wave upon a beach.

In truth, not too many cyclopians were killed by the falling wall. It didn’t collapse, but rather fell like a tree, and many of the brutes were able to scramble back out of harm’s way. But their formation was broken by the ensuing confusion, and when Luthien’s line along the inner wall loosed their first barrage of arrows, more hit cyclopian flesh than blocking shields.

Luthien didn’t witness that devastating barrage. He and fifty others were down in the courtyard behind the main gates, mounted on the finest steeds that could be found within the city. Caer MacDonald’s inner doors were swung wide, and ropes and ladders were dropped over the wall to aid in the flight of those allies coming in from the outer wall. Archers picked their shots carefully, taking down the leading cyclopians so that as few as possible of the defenders would be caught in combat outside the city.

Out from the gates came the cavalry, led by Luthien, crimson cape and reddish hair flying wild behind him, Blind-Striker held high to the gray morning sky.

Beyond the rubble of the outer wall, Belsen’Krieg and his undercommanders regrouped quickly and sent on a new and furious charge. Luthien and his mounted allies prepared to meet it and slow it, so that those running from the outer wall could get to safety. The young Bedwyr regrouped the cavalry around him, set the line for the charge. The bulk of the cyclopians were sixty feet away, twenty feet inside the rubble of the outer wall.

Luthien’s eyes widened in amazement as the ground erupted right at the feet of the enemy force, as Shuglin and his five hundred dwarfs crawled up from their concealment, hacking and chopping their hated, one-eyed enemies with abandon.

Another volley of arrows whipped down from the wall behind Luthien; the ballista atop the Ministry blasted a huge hole in one rank of the cyclopian line.

“Eriador free!” Luthien bellowed, and out he charged, fifty horsemen alongside him, running headlong into the writhing black-and-silver mass.

The most horrible and confusing minutes of Luthien Bedwyr’s young life ensued, amidst a tangle of bodies, the whir of arrows, the screams of the dying. Every way he turned, Luthien found another cyclopian to slash; his horse was torn out from under him and he was caught by a dwarf whom he never got the chance to thank, for they were soon separated by a throng of slashing enemies.

Luthien got hit, several times, but he hardly noticed. He drove Blind-Striker halfway through one cyclopian, then yanked it free and slashed across, gouging the bulbous eye of another. The first one he had hit, though, was not quite dead, too enraged and confused and horrified all at once to lie down and die.

Luthien felt the warmth of his own blood rolling down the side of his leg. He spun back and moved to finish the grievously wounded brute, but never got the chance as another wave rolled in between them, pushing them far apart. Always before, even in the scrambles in and around the Ministry, Luthien’s battles had been personal, had been face-to-face with an opponent, or side by side with a friend, until one could move along to the next fight. Not this time, though. Half the cyclopians Luthien engaged were already carrying wounds from previous encounters; most of the friends he spotted were carried away by the sheer press of that murderous frenzy before he could even acknowledge them.

With the archers who had fled the outer wall bolstering the line, the fire from the inner wall was devastating. And with Luthien’s cavalry and the dwarfs scrambling amid the cyclopian ranks, the brutes could not form up into any defensive shell.

The momentum of the ambushing groups had played out, however, and though the cyclopian line had bent, it had not broken. The confusing battle turned into a frenzied retreat for Luthien’s group and the dwarfs, what few could manage to get away from the roiling mass of Praetorian Guards.

They came out in bunches mostly, every one trailing blood, from weapon and from body, and not a single dwarf or rider would have made it back to the city had not the archers on the wall covered their retreat.

Luthien thought his life was surely at its end. He killed one cyclopian, but his sword got hooked on the creature’s collarbone. Before he could extract the weapon and turn to defend himself, he got swatted on the ribs by a heavy club. Breathless and dizzy, the young Bedwyr spun and tumbled.

The next thing he knew, he was half-running, half-carried from the throng, heading for the wall. He heard the growls of cyclopians on his heels, heard the buzz of arrows above his head, but he was distant from it somehow.

Then he was dragged up a ladder, caught from above by several hands, and hauled over the wall. He looked back as he tumbled, and the last thing he saw before his consciousness left him was the face and blue-black beard of Shuglin as the dwarf, his dear friend, came over the wall behind him.

“You are needed up on the wall,” came a call in Luthien’s head, a distant plea, but a voice that he recognized. He opened bleary eyes to see Siobhan bending over him.

“Can you rise?” she asked.

Luthien didn’t seem to understand, but he didn’t resist as Siobhan lifted his head from the blanket and took up his arm.

“The wall?” Luthien asked, sitting up and shaking the daze from his mind. All the memories of earlier that morning, the horror of the pitched battle, the blood and the screams, flooded back to him then, like the images of a nightmare not yet forgotten in the light of dawn.

“We held,” Siobhan informed him, prodding him on, forcing him to his feet. She took hold of him as he stood, steadying him. “We scattered them and stung them. Their dead litter the field.”

Luthien liked the words, but there was something in Siobhan’s words, an edge of anxiety, that told him she was trying to convince herself more than him. He wasn’t surprised when she continued.

“But they have re-formed their lines and are advancing,” the half-elf explained. “Your wounds are not so bad, and your presence is needed at the wall.” Even as she spoke, she was dragging him along, and Luthien felt like an ornament, a figurehead, symbol of the revolution. At that moment, he didn’t doubt that if he had died, Siobhan wouldn’t tell anybody; she’d just prop him up against the wall, tie Blind-Striker to his upraised hand, and shove a dwarf under his cape to call out glorious cheers.

When Luthien got up to the wall, though, he began to appreciate the cold edge of Siobhan’s actions. The field before Caer MacDonald, all the way to the rubble of the outer wall, was covered in bodies and red-soaked with blood, huge puddles of blood that couldn’t find its way into the frozen ground. Every so often, someone from the wall would hurl something down to the field and the air would throb with beating wings as countless carrion birds lifted off into the gray sky—a sky that had grown darker as the day progressed.

It was such a surreal, unbelievable scene of carnage that Luthien could hardly sort it out. Most of the dead were cyclopians, all silver and black and red with blood, but among them were the corpses of many men and women, a few elves, and many, many of Shuglin’s bearded folk.

That’s what Luthien saw most of all: the dead dwarfs. The brave dwarfs who had sprung up in the midst of the marching army, causing chaos and destruction, though they knew they would pay dearly for their actions. It seemed to the young Bedwyr as if all of them were out there broken and torn, sacrificed not to save Caer MacDonald but only to ward off the first cyclopian charge.

His face ashen, breathing hard, Luthien looked at Siobhan. “How many?” he asked.

“More than three hundred,” she replied grimly. “Two hundred of them dwarfs.” Siobhan stood straighter suddenly, squared her shoulders and her delicate jaw. “But five times that number of cyclopians lay dead,” she estimated, and it seemed to Luthien that there were at least that many bodies covering the field.

Luthien looked away, back to the field, then beyond the field and the rubble, to the swarming black-and-silver mass, the Avon army coming on once more. He took note of a lighter patch of gray in the sky and figured that it was not yet noon, yet here they came again, to repeat the scene of carnage, to cover the dead with a second layer.

“All in one morning,” the young man whispered.

Luthien examined his line. There would be no falling outer wall this time, no ambush by Shuglin’s people. This time, the cyclopians would march right to the inner wall, and if they overcame its defenders, if they got into the city, Caer MacDonald would be lost.

Would be lost, and the rebellion would be at its end, and Eriador would not be free. Luthien did not consider the personal implications of it all, did not even think that he might die in the next hours, or wonder about the consequences to himself if he did not die and the city was lost. Now, up on this wall, the situation was larger than that; there was too much more at stake.

Strength flowed through Luthien’s battered limbs; he hoisted his sword high into the air, commanding the attention of all those nearby.

“Eriador free!” came the cheer. “Caer MacDonald!”

Next to Luthien, Siobhan nodded approvingly. She half-expected the young Bedwyr to pass out from his wounds and knew that he would find this next battle difficult indeed. But he had accomplished what she needed of him, and if he was among the dead after this attack, she would cultivate the legend; she would have every remaining soldier defending Caer MacDonald add the name of Luthien Bedwyr to the cheer.

Those thoughts were for another time, the half-elf told herself. The catapults fired, the ballistae twanged, and the squared cyclopian groups—two now, not three as in the first attack—plodded on. Upon the wall, a thousand bows bent back and fired, and then again, and again, and again, a thick hail of arrows whistling and thumping against shields, occasionally slipping through a crack in the cyclopian defensive formation.

Still they came on, the black-and-silver, undeniable flood. They crossed the rubble of the outer wall, stepped over or on top of the dead. An incessant popping noise, the rapid bursts of arrows slamming against metal, became one long drone, mixing with the hum of bowstrings, the very air vibrating.

The Praetorian Guard broke ranks less than fifty feet from the wall. Ladders appeared; dozens twirled ropes with heavy grapnels as they charged the wall. One large group supported a felled tree between their lines and charged the main gates.

Arrow volleys from the gatehouses decimated the group holding the battering ram, but many other cyclopians were nearby to take up the tree.

Now the ring of swords, steel on steel, was heard up and down the wall. Cries of rage mingled with cries of agony, snarls and wails, hoots of victory that became horrifying, agonizing shrieks a moment later as the next opponent struck hard.

At first, cyclopians died by the score, ten to one over the defenders. But as more grapnels came sailing over the wall, as more and more Praetorian Guards gained footing, stretching the line of the defenders, the ratio began to shift.

Soon it became five to one, then two to one.

Luthien seemed to be everywhere, running along the battlements, striking hard and fast before racing on to the next fight, chopping a taut cyclopian climbing rope on his way. He lost track of his kills and wasn’t really certain how many brutes he actually finished anyway. He felt that the defenders would hold, though the price would be heavy indeed.

An explosion, a shudder along the wall near to the gatehouses, nearly knocked the young Bedwyr from his feet and did indeed tumble a couple of men and cyclopians nearby.

A second followed, then a third, accompanied by the sound of hammers working furiously.

“The door!” someone shouted, and Luthien understood. He glanced over the wall and saw the mass congregating, saw the end of the dropped tree, its mission completed.

Down from the wall leaped Luthien, into the courtyard, into the tangle. He believed that he was rushing to his death, but couldn’t stop himself. The cyclopians were in the courtyard, pouring through the broken gates. This was where Caer MacDonald would fall or hold, and this was where Luthien Bedwyr had to be.

Soon, as it had been out in the courtyard for the first fight, there were no defined lines, just a mass of soldiers, killing and dying. Luthien tripped over one dying man, and the stumble saved his life, for as he lurched low, a cyclopian sword, still dripping with blood of the victim Luthien had tripped across, whipped high, just above the young Bedwyr’s bent back. Luthien realized that if he stopped, he would be killed before he could turn and face this adversary, so he threw his weight ahead, plowing into another group.

Right into the midst of three cyclopians.

Up on the wall, Siobhan and her elves continued sending a stream of arrows into the mass outside of Caer MacDonald’s wall, while the larger and stronger humans battled with those brutes stubbornly scrambling up the ropes and ladders.

“Find their leaders!” the half-elf commanded, and many of her archers were already doing just that. They scanned the mob, seeking out any one-eye giving orders, and whenever an elf spotted one, he called all those archers near to him to bear a concentrated barrage.

One by one, Belsen’Krieg’s undercommanders went tumbling to the dirt.

Luthien went down to his knees in a spin, completing a semicircle and whipping his sword across, straight out, driving two of the cyclopians back. The young man brought his lead foot under him, coming about and up, batting the third brute’s blade high and lunging forward, gutting the one-eye.

Luthien rushed forward, tearing free Blind-Striker as he passed, then cutting right around, using the falling brute as a shield from the other two, who were close on his heels. He came out behind the tumbling cyclopian, slashing and charging.

One of the cyclopians wielded a trident, the other a sword, and both weapons were knocked aside in that furious charge. The cyclopian with the trident jumped back, put one hand over the butt end of the weapon, and launched it straight for Luthien’s head.

Luthien, quick as a cat, dropped down and parried, sword coming high and deflecting the angle of the deadly missile. He didn’t let the trident fly past him, though, but caught it halfway along its shaft in his free hand as the sword defeated its momentum, then reversed its angle, bringing its butt to the ground just in front of him and angling it out to the side, setting it against the charge of the sword-wielder.

The cyclopian skidded to a stop, but got poked in the shoulder.

Luthien wasn’t paying attention. He left the trident the moment it was set, rushing out the other way, toward the brute that had hurled the weapon. The cyclopian scrambled, trying to pull a short sword from its belt. It got the weapon out, but too late, while Luthien’s sword slammed hard against its hilt, knocking it from the one-eye’s grasp.

Straight up went Blind-Striker, cutting like a knife, slicing the brute’s face from chin to forehead. The sword spun around and down in a diagonal swipe, tearing at the brute’s collarbone, across its lower throat and down and under its right breast. Luthien managed yet another stab as the brute fell away, again in the belly.

The young Bedwyr whirled about, instinctively slashing his sword before him, just in time to pick off the sword of the remaining brute. Back came Blind-Striker, parrying the weapon again, and then a third time, and with each pass, Luthien gained ground, forced his opponent to backpedal. Pure rage drove the young man; this was his homeland; his Eriador. He stabbed and slashed, dropped and cut at the brute down low, then leaped up and poked at the cyclopian’s eye.

“How many can you block?” he screamed into the brute’s face, pushing it back, ever back, up on its heels until it stumbled.

A club knocked free from a nearby melee hit Luthien on the leg and he, too, stumbled, and the cyclopian tried to reverse the momentum, tried to go on the offensive. It jabbed with its short sword, but wasn’t able to throw its weight into the thrust. Luthien fell back, then came forward in a rush, beyond the extended weapon, Blind-Striker driving straight into the brute’s heart.

It had all happened in the span of a few moments; three kills before the blood had even dripped from the blade. Luthien tore his sword free and jumped about, expecting to be overwhelmed in the crush. He was surprised, for suddenly there seemed to be many fewer cyclopians in the courtyard. He looked at the doors and saw that Shuglin’s tough three hundred had fought in a line to seal the courtyard, and now many dwarfs had their shoulders to the battered doors, holding them fast. Still, by Luthien’s estimation, there should have been more cyclopians, more frenzied fighting, in the courtyard.

Luthien sprinted to a stack of crates piled nearby and leaped atop it, and from the better vantage point, he understood the cyclopian tactics. Instead of fighting a pitched battle just inside the gates, many of the one-eyes had broken away and were running and scattering along Caer MacDonald’s streets.

A cry from the wall above Luthien declared that the cyclopians outside were in retreat. It was repeated all along the defensive line, accompanied by rousing cheers. With the slaughter becoming more and more one-sided inside the gates, the second assault, like the first, had been repelled.

Luthien didn’t feel much like cheering. “Clever,” he whispered, a private applause for his adversary, no doubt the huge and ugly cyclopian he had seen at Felling Run.

Siobhan was beside him a moment later, her shoulder wet with fresh blood. “They have broken away,” the half-elf reported.

“And many have slipped into the city,” Luthien replied grimly.

“We will hunt them down,” Siobhan promised, a vow Luthien did not doubt. But Luthien knew, and Siobhan did, too, that hunting the brutes would be an expensive proposition. The fact that they would have to take the effort to search out these cyclopians was exactly the point of the maneuver, for it would take as many as ten defenders to search out each creature that had slipped into the many alleyways of Caer MacDonald.

Somewhere far away from the wall came the cry of “Fire!” and a plume of black smoke began a slow and steady ascent over the interior of the city. The cyclopians were already at work.

Luthien looked to the wall and thought again of his clever adversary, a tactician far better than he would expect from the crude one-eyed race. There were, perhaps, twenty thousand enemies facing each other, another few thousand already lying dead, but suddenly it all seemed to be a personal struggle to Luthien, as it had out by Felling Run. The ugly cyclopian against him.

And if he lost, then all of Caer MacDonald would pay the dear price.