Rebellion

CHAPTER 42

“What’s the matter with them?” said Rix, punching the steel gauntlet on his dead hand into the palm of his other hand. He wore it all the time now, because it made his dead hand into a formidable weapon. “Why don’t they attack?”

“Perhaps they’re waiting for reinforcements,” said Droag, idly polishing his sword.

“Any sign of the healers?” said Rix.

“No,” said Nuddell gloomily. “Must’ve gone into hiding. No way they can reach us now.”

Or else the enemy had caught or killed them.

They were up on the tower behind the gates again. The Cythonians had been outside for two days now, camped in the snow in a semicircle, several hundred yards out of arrow range. They had not fired at the fortress, nor used any of the chymical terror weapons they had employed to such devastating effect in the early days of the war.

From time to time they sent raiding parties across the plateau. The sentries on the walls would see smoke rising and know that another manor or village had been burned, along with anyone who had missed the call to take refuge in the fortress. The raiding party would return, driving cattle, sheep or goats before them, which they butchered and roasted over spits. Then the waiting resumed.

“They’re doing it to wear us down,” said Swelt, rubbing his depleted belly.

Now that the fortress was at war, everyone had to make do on reduced rations, even the castellan.

“They did the same thing at Caulderon,” said Glynnie. “After they blasted the gates, they didn’t attack for several days, and our armies couldn’t touch them. By the time they stormed the walls, morale was in tatters.”

“If they don’t attack today, it’ll be their last chance for a week,” said Nuddell, who was studying the sky. “There’s a blizzard coming, a big one.”

Away in the south-west, a black cloud-bank had been developing for ages, thickening and spreading until it covered the southern sky.

“Those clouds haven’t moved in days,” scoffed Droag. “If it gets any warmer the daffodils will come out.”

“Nor’westerlies are holding the blizzard back,” said Nuddell, “but they can’t last much longer. And once they break,” he said with dire relish, “the coming blizzard will tear the hairs right out of your nose.”

Droag plucked a clump of his luxuriant nose hairs, studied them incuriously, then let them fall. “Ain’t a breath of wind, Nuddell.”

“Mark my words, boy. It’ll be howling by dinner time.”

“Our biggest weakness is the length of the wall,” said Rix to his officers. “Ignoring the escarpment side, which is too steep for anyone to attack, we’ve got over half a mile of wall to defend. And only three hundred and ninety men, counting the reserves.”

“Surely they’ll attack the gates,” said Noys. “They’re always the weakest point.”

“But ours are strongly defended. And if they attack somewhere else under cover of darkness, they might get up onto the wall before we realise what they’re doing.”

“If you reinforce all the places they’re likely to attack — ”

“We don’t have enough men,” said Rix. “We’d need another two hundred, at least.”

By noon the black cloud-bank was perceptibly closer and the towering storms at its front were illuminated by continuous flashes of lightning. By three in the afternoon, odd little puffs of warm air kept breaking the eerie calm. The high clouds ahead of the front had spread to cover all but a lens of sky in the north-west, through which were focused the slanting, blood-red rays of the descending sun.

At twenty to four, the storm struck with a flurry of heavy raindrops, followed by a fusillade of hail. Rix clapped on his helmet. At the same moment, the lens of bright sky vanished and it became almost as dark as night.

Nuddell, grinning, said something Rix could not make out over the hammering of hailstones on his helmet.

“What did you say?” said Rix.

“You can stand down the extra men,” Nuddell yelled. “There won’t be an attack today.”

“Why not?” said Droag.

“If they try to fight in a blizzard,” said Rix, “half their troops are liable to die of exposure.”

A red flash from the enemy’s position was followed by a smashing thud below.

“What the hell was that?” said Nuddell, the whites of his eyes shining in the gloom.

“Bombast,” said Rix.

He looked down. The exploding projectile must have been enormous, for it had blasted a ragged, cart-sized hole through the top of the great gates. Half a dozen guards on the right-hand wall lay dead or wounded, cut down by jagged, flying timber.

“Hope that’s the only one they’ve got,” said Nuddell.

“I doubt it,” Rix said curtly.

One bombast blast would not let the enemy in. Rix, who knew the power of the enemy’s weaponry first-hand, had ordered a stone wall built behind the gates. But the damage was worrying.

“Why now?” said Nuddell. “What’s the point? They can’t attack today.”

The answer came like a flash of lightning. “Maybe they are going to attack — despite the weather. Come on!”

He bolted along the wall towards the gates, hailstones the size of plums bouncing off his helmet and cracking painfully into his shoulders, chest and knees. A minute ago he had been sweltering in tunic and leather armour. Now his breath steamed in front of him and the hail and rain was so thick that he could barely see the gate tower.

Lightning struck the largest copper dome behind him, sending sparks in all directions. Another bolt hit something on the wall ten yards to his left — a guard — blowing him to pieces.

The shockwave drove Rix down to hands and knees and he remained there for a couple of seconds, wiping blood off his face, before getting back to his feet. The lightning could as easily have struck him. Was there malice behind the storm, some purpose directing it to harry them before the attack began? Could Lyf’s power have grown that strong? Perhaps, now that he had four ebony pearls, it could.

As Rix ran on, a Cythonian shriek-arrow shot past his nose, the eerie sound raising his hackles as it was intended to do. How could the enemy see to fire? Or were they firing blind in the hope of creating as much terror as possible before the storm, in all its fury, drove them into shelter?

He stopped to scan the area outside the wall. It was too dark to pick out individual details, but when the lightning flashed again he saw a brown, spreading mass. The army was moving! Unbelievably, they were attacking in the full ferocity of the storm; ignoring the lightning, the hailstones slamming into their helmets and shoulders, the icy rain in their eyes.

Fear shuddered through him. How could they be so driven? His men were huddled under whatever shelter they could find. They would not see the enemy raise their scaling ladders to the walls, or attach hand-carried bombasts to vulnerable points in the defences. Their plan was madness yet, if Rix could not get his men into position in time, it could succeed.

“They’re attacking!” he bellowed, so loudly that it hurt.

He barely heard his own voice over the crashing hailstones, the shrieking wind and the continuous boom and thump of thunder. No one could hear anything; his men would be deafened.

He had to know where the attack was focused. Logic said that they would attack the damaged gates, but logic wasn’t a reliable ally where the Cythonians were concerned. Rix leaned over the wall, trying not to think about the shriek-arrows flying all around.

A small company was attacking the gates, but the rest of the enemy force was heading hundreds of yards to the left, where Garramide’s outer walls curved in around a black outcrop called Basalt Crag. It was a weak point in the wall and, because the enemy had been camped outside the gates, he had only left a handful of men up at the crag. Not nearly enough to defend it against a full attack.

“Nuddell, follow me!”

He raced along the wall to the gate tower; nothing mattered but speed. Rix burst onto the open top of the tower, skidding on an inch-deep layer of hailstones and nearly falling. It was empty. Where were his men? There! The bastards were huddling in a little wooden cabin and no one was keeping watch.

He kept running, leapt at the door, feet-first, burst it off its hinges and crashed in among them. Wild-eyed and covered in the dead man’s blood, he must have looked like a lunatic.

“They’re attacking up at the crag!” he bellowed.

“In this?” said a grizzled, toothless old fellow.

“Yes! Nuddell, take these men up to Basalt Crag. Keep low so they don’t see you. Out!”

He drove the stragglers out with bruising blows of his steel-encased fist, then continued to the next watchtower, leaving the men stationed along the wall in place but ordering all those on the watchtowers, plus the reinforcements waiting below, up to Basalt Crag.

“We’re the reinforcements,” said a surly fellow that Rix remembered from the raid on Jadgery. He was one of those who had run at the first opportunity.

Rix clamped his steel fingers around the man’s throat. “Get up there now or I’ll choke the life out of you right here. And if you ever desert your post again, you’re dead!”

The hailstones were only the size of grapes now, but the rain grew heavier. Rix had never seen such a storm. He was soaked to the pores of his skin, his feet were squelching in his boots and, despite the exertion, he was freezing.

He did the same at the next tower, but as he approached the one after that he saw no one there. What was the matter with the fools? He leapt a puddle six feet across and so deep that lemon-sized hailstones were bobbing in it, and raced on, his breath tearing in his throat and his fear growing. So far he’d only sent back twenty men. Not nearly enough. Without a hundred there was little hope of defending Basalt Crag.

Rix cursed his lack of foresight. He’d known it was vulnerable. Why hadn’t he prepared a plan to deal with it? Because in good visibility he would know where the enemy were attacking and could reinforce Basalt Crag with a hundred men in minutes.

He leapt another pool and raced on to the tower. A triple lightning flash showed five or six men down, some lying in pools of water. And he had no proper healers. This was going to be a disaster.

There was no blast damage to the tower, so he assumed the troops had been struck by lightning. One or two people were bending over bodies. The rest of the guards were huddled under a lean-to roof on the far side, their white eyes picked out in every flash.

Rix bellowed his orders, saw the men away and was about to run on when another flash revealed Glynnie, kneeling in the water beside a man bleeding from the nose and mouth. She was only wearing her housemaid’s gown, which was wet through and plastered to her slim figure by the wind.

His heart turned over. He ran across. “What are you doing up here, dressed like that? If the lightning strikes again, or a flight of arrows falls — ”

“You do your job, I’ll do mine,” she said without looking around. Then something made her look up and she cried, “Rix, your face.”

His right cheek was swollen and torn open. It was so numb from cold that he had not noticed.

“Must have been a hailstone. I’m all right.”

She turned back to the bleeding man, wiped his face and yelled, “Stretcher bearers!”

Two wide-eyed lads came splashing through the water and took the man down the steps.

“At least put some leather armour on,” said Rix.

Glynnie stood up, shivering and rubbing the small of her back. “There’s none my size.”

“Please take care of yourself.”

He ran on to the next tower and sent its men back, then plodded to the one after that. The cold was getting to him now. His heavy armour and gear was a greater burden with every step and he wasn’t halfway around the damned wall.

Fear gnawed at his belly. The enemy were ferocious fighters and gave no quarter. How many had headed across towards Basalt Crag? It had looked like hundreds. They would be raising their scaling ladders already, and no more than fifty of his men could have reached that part of the wall.

Too few! And most of his men were local yeomen and peasantry who had never fought before. Would any of them know how to repel men scaling the wall — which was the best way, which the worst? This savage storm was not the place to learn on the job.

Worst of all, they were leaderless and he was a third of a mile away on the other side of the fortress. He could not see the enemy from here, had no idea what was going on and, whether he turned back or kept going, it would take him precious minutes to reach the danger zone.

What had he been thinking? Why hadn’t he sent runners to do the job for him, and run straight back?

Had he made the biggest mistake of his recent, disastrous life?