Planet Of Exile

CHAPTER TWELVE: The Siege of the Square

THE HIGH, narrow Sea Gate clashed to, the bolts shot home. The battle in the storm was over. But the men of the city turned and saw, over the red-stained drifts in the street and through the still-falling snow, shadows running.

They took up their dead and wounded hastily and returned to the Square. In this blizzard no watch could be kept against ladders, climbers; you could not see along the walls more than fifteen feet to either hand. A Gaal or a group of them had slipped in, right under the noses of the guards, and opened the Sea Gate to the assault. That assault had been driven out, but the next one could come anywhere, at any time, in greater force.

"I think," Umaksuman said, walking with Agat towards the barricade between the Thiatr and the College, "that most of the Gaal went on south today."

Agat nodded. "They must have. If they don't move on they starve. What we face now is an occupying force left behind to finish us off and live on our stores. How many do you think?"

"Not more than a thousand were there at the gate," the native said doubtfully. "But there may be more. And they'll all be inside the walls—There!" Umaksuman pointed to a quick cowering shape that the snow-curtains revealed for a moment halfway up the street. "You that way," the native muttered and vanished abruptly to the left. Agat circled the block from the right, and met Umaksuman in the street again. "No luck," he said.

"Luck," the Tevaran said briefly, and held up a bone-inlaid Gaal ax which he had not had a minute ago. Over their heads the bell of the Hall tower kept sending out its soft dull clanging through the snow: one, two—one, two— one, two—Retreat to the Square, to the Square ... All who had fought at the Sea Gate, and those who had been patrolling the walls and the Land Gate, or asleep in their houses or trying to watch from the roofs, had come or were coming to the city's heart, the Square between the four great buildings. One by one they were let through the barricades.

Imaksuman and Agat came along at last, knowing it was folly to stay out now in these streets where shadows ran. "Let's go, Alterra!" the native urged him, and Agat came, but reluctantly. It was hard to leave his city to the enemy.

The wind was down now. Sometimes, through the queer complex hush of the storm, people in the Square could hear glass shattering, the splintering of an ax against a door, up one of the streets that led off into the falling snow. Many of the houses had been left unlocked, open to the looters: they would find very little in them beyond shelter from the snow. Every scrap of food had been turned in to the Commons here in the Hall a week ago. The water-mains and the natural-gas mains to all buildings except the four around the Square had been shut off last night. The fountains of Landin stood dry, under their rings of icicles and burdens of snow. All stores and granaries were underground, in the vaults and cellars dug generations ago beneath the Old Hall and the League Hall. Empty, icy, light-less, the deserted houses stood, offering nothing to the invaders.

"They can live off our herds for a moonphase—even without feed for them, they'll slaughter the hann and dry the meat—" Dermat Alterra had met Agat at the very door of the League Hall, full of panic and reproach.

"They'll have to catch the hann first," Agat growled in reply.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that we opened the byres a few minutes ago, while we were there at the Sea Gate, and let

'em go. Paol Herdsman was with me and he sent out a panic. They ran like a shot, right out into the blizzard."

"You let the hann go—the herds? What do we live on the rest of the winter—if the Gaal leave?"

"Did Paol mindsending to the hann panic you too, Dermat?" Agat fired at him. "D'you think we can't round up our own animals? What about our grain stores, hunting, snowcrop—what the devil's wrong with you!"

"Jakob," murmured Seiko Esmit, coming between him and the older man. He realized he had been yelling at Dermat, and tried to get hold of himself. But it was damned hard to come in from a bloody fight like that defense of the Sea Gate and have to cope with a case of male hysteria. His head ached violently; the scalp wound he had got in one of their raids on the Gaal camp still hurt, though it should have healed already; he had got off unhurt at the Sea Gate, but he was filthy with other men's blood. Against the high, unshuttered windows of the library the snow streaked and whispered. It was noon; it seemed dusk. Beneath the windows lay the Square with its well-guarded barricades. Beyond those lay the abandoned houses, the defenseless waLls, the city of snow and shadows.

That day of their retreat to the Inner City, the fourth day of seige, they stayed inside thenbarricades; but already that night, when the snowfall thinned for a while, a reconnoitering party slipped out via the roofs of the College. The blizzard grew worse again around daybreak, or a second storm perhaps followed right on the first, and under cover of the snow and cold the men and boys of Landin played guerrilla in their own streets. They went out by twos or threes, prowling the streets and roofs and rooms, shadows among the shadows. They used knives, poisoned darts, bolos, arrows. They broke into their own homes and killed the Gaal who sheltered there, or were killed by them.

Having a good head for heights, Agat was one of the best at playing the game from roof to roof.

Snow made the steep-pitched tiles pretty slippery, but the chance to pick off Gaal with darts was irresistible, and the chances of getting killed no higher than in other versions of the sport, streetcorner dodging or house-haunting.

The sixth day of seige, the fourth of storm: this day the snowfall was fine, sparse, wind-driven.

Thermometers down hi the basement Records Room of the old Hall, which they were using now as a hospital, read —4C. outside, and the anemometers showed gusts well over a hundred kmh. Outside it was terrible, the wind lashing that fine snow at one's face like gravel, whirling it in through the smashed glass of windows whose shutters had been torn off to build a campfire, drifting it across splintered floors. There was little warmth and little food anywhere in the city, except inside the four buildings around the Square. The Gaal huddled in empty rooms, burning mats and broken doors and shutters and chests in the middle of the floor, waiting out the storm. They had no provisions—what food there was had gone with the Southing. When the weather changed they would be able to hunt, and finish off the townsfolk, and thereafter live on the city's winter stores.

But while the storm lasted, the attackers starved.

They held the causeway, if it was any good to them. Watchers in the League Tower had seen their one hesitant foray out to the Stack, which ended promptly in a rain of lances and a raised drawbridge.

Very few of them had been seen venturing on the low-tide beaches below the cliffs of Landin; probably they had seen the tide come roaring in, and had no idea how often and when it would come next, for they were inlanders. So the Stack was safe, and some of the trained paraverbalists in the city had been in touch with one or another of the men and women out on the island, enough to know they were getting on well, and to tell anxious fathers that there were no children sick. The Stack was all right. But the city was breached, invaded, occupied; more than a hundred of its people already killed in its defense, and the rest trapped in a few buildings. A city of snow, and shadows, and blood.

Jakob Agat crouched in a gray-walled room. It was empty except for a litter of torn felt matting and broken glass over which fine snow had sifted. The house was silent. There under the windows where the pallet had been, he and Rolery had slept one night; she had waked him in the morning.

Crouching there, a housebreaker in his own house, he thought of Rolery with bitter tenderness.

Once—it seemed far back hi time, twelve days ago maybe—he had said hi this same room thet he could not get on without her; and now he had no time day or night even to think of her. Then let me think of her now, at least think of her, he said ragefully to the silence; but all he could think was that she and he had been born at the wrong time. In the wrong season. You cannot begin a love hi the beginning of the season of death.

Wind whistled peevishly at the broken windows. Agat shivered. He had been hot all day, when he was not freezing cold. The thermometer was still dropping, and a lot of the rooftop guerillas were having trouble with what the old men said was frostbite. He felt better if he kept moving.

Thinking did no good. He started for the door out of a life-tune's habit, then getting hold of himself went softly to the window by which he had entered. In the ground-floor room of the house next door a group of Gaal were camped. He could see the back of one near the window. They were a fair people; their hair was darkened and made stiff with some kind of pitch or tar, but the bowed, muscular neck Agat looked down on was white. It was strange how little chance he had had actually to see his enemies. You shot from a distance, or struck and ran, or as at the Sea Gate fought too close and fast to look. He wondered if their eyes were yellowish or amber like those of the Tevarans; he had an impression that they were gray, instead. But this was no time to find out. He climbed up on the sill, swung out on the gable, and left his home via the roof.

His usual route back to the Square was blocked: the Gaal were beginning to play the rooftop game too. He lost all but one of his pursuers quickly enough, but that one, armed with a dart-blower, came right after him, leaping an eight-foot gap between two houses that had stopped the others.

Agat had to drop down into an alley, pick himself up and run for it.

A guard on the Esmit Street barricade, watching for just such escapes, flung down a rope ladder to him, and he swarmed up it. Just as he reached the top a dart stung his right hand. He came sliding down inside the barricade, pulled the thing out and sucked the wound and spat. The Gaal did not poison their darts or arrows, but they picked up and used the ones the men of Landin shot at them, and some of these, of course, were poisoned. It was a rather neat demonstration of one reason for the canonical Law of Embargo. Agat had a very bad couple of minutes waiting for the first cramp to hit him; then decided he was lucky, and thereupon began to feel the pain of the messy little wound in his hand. His shooting hand, too.

Dinner was being dished out in the Assembly Hall, beneath the golden clocks. He had not eaten since daybreak. He was ravening hungry until he sat down at one of the tables with his bowl of hot bhan and salt meat; then he could not eat. He did not want to talk, .either, but it was better than eating, so he talked with everyone who gathered around him, until the alarm rang out on the bell in the tower above them: another attack.

As usual, the assault moved from barricade to barricade; as usual it did not amount to much.

Nobody could lead a prolonged attack in this bitter weather. What they were after in these shifting, twilight raids was the chance of slipping even one or two of their men over a momentarily unguarded barricade into the Square, to open the massive iron doors at the back of Old Hall. As darkness came, the attackers melted away. The archers shooting from upper win-I dows of the Old Hall and College held their fire and presently called down that the streets were clear. As usual, a few defenders had been hurt or killed: one crossbowman picked off at his window by an arrow from below, one boy who, climbing too high on the barricade to shoot down, had been hit in the belly with an iron-headed lance; several minor injuries. Every day a few more were killed or wounded and there were less to guard and fight. The subtraction of a few from too few ...

Hot and shivering again, Agat came in from this action. Most of the men who had been eating when the alarm came went back and finished eating. Agat had no interest in food now except to avoid the smell of it. His scratched hand kept bleeding afresh whenever he used it, which gave him an excuse to go down to the Records Room, underneath Old Hall, to have the bonesetter tie it up for him.

It was a very large, low-ceilinged room, kept at even warmth and even soft light night and day, a good place to keep old instruments and charts and papers, and an equally good place to keep wounded men. They lay on improvised pallets on the felted floor, little islands of sleep and pain dotted about in the silence of the long room. Among them he saw his wife coming towards him, as he had hoped to see her. The sight, the real certain sight of her, did not rouse in him that bitter tenderness he felt -when he thought about her: instead it simply gave him intense pleasure.

"Hullo, Rolery," he mumbled and turned away from her at once to Seiko and the bonesetter Wattock, asking how Hum Pilotson was. He did not know what to do with delight any more, it overcame him.

"His wound grows," Wattock said in a whisper. Agat stared at him, then realized he was speaking of Pilotson. "Grows?" he repeated uncomprehending and went over to kneel at Pilotson's side.

Pilotson was looking up at him.

"How's it going, Huru?"

"You made a very bad mistake," the wounded man said.

They had known each other and been friends all their lives. Agat knew at once and unmistakably what would be on Pilotson's mind: his marriage. But he did not know what j to answer. "It wouldn't have made much difference," he j began finally, then stopped; he would not justify himself. j Pilotson said, "There aren't enough, there aren't } enough."

Only then did Agat realize that his friend was out of his head. "It's all right, Huru!" he said so authoritatively that Pilotson after a moment sighed and shut his eyes, seeming to accept this blanket reassurance. Agat got up and rejoined Wattock. "Look, tie this up, will you, to stop the bleeding.—What's wrong with Pilotson?"

Rolery brought cloth and tape. Wattock bandaged Agat's hand with a couple of expert turns.

"Alterra," he said, "I don't know. The Gaal must be using a poison our antidotes can't handle.

I've tried 'em all. Pilotson Alterra isn't the only one. The wounds don't close; they swell up.

Look at this boy here. It's the same thing." The boy, a street-guerilla of sixteen or so, was moaning and struggling like one in nightmare. The spear-wound in his thigh showed no bleeding, but red streaks ran from it under the skin, and the whole wound was strange to look at and very hot to the touch.

"You've tried antidotes?" Agat asked, looking away from the boy's tormented face.

"All of them. Alterra, what it reminds me of is the wound you got, early in Fall, from the klois you treed. Remember that? Perhaps they make some poison from the blood or glands of klois. Perhaps these wounds will go away as that did. Yes, that's the scar—When he was a young fellow like this one," Wattock explained to Seiko and Rolery, "he went up a tree after a klois, and the scratches it gave him didn't seem much, but they puffed up and got hot and made him sick.

But in a few days it all went off again."

"This one won't get well," Rolery said very softly to Agat.

"Why do you say that?"

"I used to ...to watch the medicine-woman of my clan. I learned a little ... Those streaks, on his leg there, those are what they call death-paths."

"You know this poison, then, Rolery?"

"I don't think it's poison. Any deep wound can do it. Even a small wound that doesn't bleed, or that gets dirty. It's the evil of the weapon—"

"That is superstition," the old bonesetter said fiercely.

"We don't get the weapon-evil, Rolery," Agat told her, drawing her rather defensively away from the indignant old doctor. "We have an—"

"But the boy and Pilotson Alterra do have it! Look here —" She took him over to where one of the wounded Tevar-ans sat, a cheerful little middle-aged fellow, who willingly showed Agat the place where his left ear had been before an ax took it off. The wound was healing, but was puffed, hot, oozing ...

Unconsciously Agat put his hand up to his own throbbing, untended scalp-wound.

Wattock had followed them. Glaring at the unoffending hilf, he said, "What the local hilfs call

'weapon-evil' is, of course, bacterial infection. You studied it in school, Alterra. As human beings are not susceptible to infection by any local bacterial or viral life-forms, the only harm we can suffer is damage to vital organs, exsanguination, or chemical poisoning, for which we have antidotes—"

"But the boy is dying, Elder," said Rolery in her soft, unyielding voice. "The wound was not washed out before it was sewed together—"

The old doctor went rigid with fury. "Get back among your own kind and don't tell me how to care for humans—"

"That's enough," Agat said.

Silence.

"Rolery," Agat said, "if you can be spared here a while, I thought we might go ..." He had been about to say, "go home." "To get some dinner, maybe," he finished vaguely.

She had not eaten; he sat with her in the Assembly Room, and ate a little. Then they put on their coats to cross the unlit, wind-whistling Square to the College building, where they shared a classroom with two other couples. The dormitories in Old Hall were more comfortable, but most of the married couples of which the wife had not gone out to the Stack preferred at least this semiprivacy, when they could have it. One woman was sound asleep behind a row of desks, bundled up in her coat. Tables had been up-ended to seal the broken windows from stones and darts and wind. Agat and his wife put their coats down on the unmatted floor for bedding. Before she let him sleep, Rolery gathered clean snow from a windowsill and washed the wounds in his hand and scalp with it.

It hurt, and he protested, short-tempered with fatigue; but she said, "You are the Alterra—you don't get sick—but this will do no harm. No harm ..."