A Sword for a Dragon (43 page)

“So now we’re all going to the Imperial City, and there we’ll starve to death.”

“No, I told you, the white ships are coming.”

“That I will believe when I see them.”

“They’re coming. There’s another legion with them. We’ll be able to hold out indefinitely after that.”

Miranswa shrugged. “So you say. You said I would be safe in the wagon.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t think we could lose the wall.”

“Let us hope you are right about your white ships.”

He tried to kiss her, but she turned her face away from him. He slid off the wagon and ducked back to report to Hatlin.

However, Relkin instead joined the dragons, who were tramping along in a tight group, despondent and dour. Dragons hated to march in armor; it always pinched their thick skin and rubbed and caused sores. In this situation, there was no time to take the armor off. They had to make their way right across the burning city to the last refuge available to them, the Imperial City.

Ahead of the dragons there were detachments of cavalry, the Talion horse, who were earning their keep this day by keeping the roads clear of the mobs. On the flanks there were Kenor bowmen scuttling through the side streets to take down snipers and rock throwers.

But there was nothing they could do about the fires except detour around the worst ones and step gingerly through the hot rubble left by others.

Behind them a rear guard of sorts was set up by skirmishing groups from the Eighth Regiment who, with the aid of a few bowmen, kept the Sephisti troops from harrying too hard upon their heels.

The march was long, and they passed many harrowing sights. They detoured widely around the blazing hulk of the granaries. The thick smoke seared their lungs and throats. What little water they had was soon gone.

On they marched, slowly sorting out into recognizable units, with the wagons bunched together between them. Once they were into the marching rhythm, it took over and each was left to his own thoughts.

Relkin felt a strange numbness overcoming his mind. They had been driven from the walls of the city. The granaries had been burned out. Was it possible that they would go down to defeat here? Relkin had fought in a number of battles, large and small, but he had never tasted bitter defeat like this. It was inconceivable, but it was happening. Miranswa might be right. They would starve to the point where they would be too weak to stop the enemy breaking into the Imperial City.

He shrugged. Death had always been a companion in his service in the legion, and he had been in tighter spots than this. He set himself to think about the weapons, moved up closer behind his two dragons, and began surreptitiously examining their equipment. The Purple Green’s helmet had more dents. Bazil’s tail sword was notched. As soon as the smiths got a fire going, he resolved to get these items seen to.

On they went, down Fatan Street and through the temple district. On the great ziggurat of Auros, there was a vast crowd of worshipers, imploring the god of rational belief to come down and save them from the demon at the gates. The crowd hardly even glanced at the legions as they tramped by. Relkin tossed in a prayer of his own. He didn’t know much about the rational god. They called him the “sea bull,” and he was said to possess the largest penis in the universe— that much he’d heard—but of the cult of rational deity, he knew nothing. Relkin wasn’t sure if there were really any gods or goddesses at all, but he figured if there was one, then there might as well be dozens, so there was no harm in praying to all of them. He tossed off a prayer to the old gods, especially Asgah, the god of war. If Asgah remembered the fighting 109th, would he please take a hand in helping the white ships get up the river? It didn’t seem that much to ask.

They crossed the Zoda with indignant mobs on either side who hurled insults and even the occasional brick. The bowmen roved up and down, however, and kept the brick throwing to a minimum.

There had been a skirmish at the gates of the Imperial City where some of the court eunuchs had tried to prevent the Argonathi from entering the hallowed ground of the Imperial City. But the men of the legions dispersed the guards and the eunuchs, and moved in to occupy the walls.

A second, sterner fight broke out in the Fortress of Zadul, which formed the buttress of the southern half of the Imperial City. Assisting the eunuchs here were some men from the Imperial Guard. The legionaries attempted to negotiate but were rebuffed, and in the end they were forced to slay a number of the Imperial Guard to clear the fortress. At the end, some men broke discipline and tossed quite a few palace eunuchs off the upper towers after rousting them from their hiding places.

Meanwhile poor General Paxion was struggling to hold onto his sanity. Everything that could have gone wrong had done so, it seemed, and now he was boxed into an impossible position. The pressures of the catastrophe were crushing. But the commanders rallied around him, even General Pekel was cooperative for once. The Kadein regiments occupied the North Tower and the Water Tower complex along with all the northern stretch of the wall. The Marneri regiments filled up the south side and the Fortress of Zadul, which had seven towers and an extensive system of dungeons and subterranean chambers. Captain Kesepton worked incredibly hard at keeping the general staff operating, and with everyone’s cooperation, they managed to slowly bring some order to the chaos and settle the two legions, the Talion cavalry, and all their wagons into the Imperial City, which already teemed with an army of eunuchs, another army of sexed slaves, and a considerable force of guards.

While all this went on, the engineers inspected the walls and began feverish repairs to the weakest places. In general, the condition of these walls was not good. They had not been rebuilt in centuries, and the mud brick of their construction was crumbling. The walls of the Fortress of Zadul, on the southeast corner were, however, in excellent repair.

Work began at once, repairing walls, building trebuchets and catapults, and settling in the dragons, horses, and legionaries in quarters that were cleared of the eunuchs and slaves.

Paxion refused to have the eunuchs simply pushed out the front gate as the other officers wished. Instead, they were penned up with the slave population in the walled city of slaves, an enclave several acres in extent near the north wall not far from the North Tower. Inside was a teeming population, all in an advanced state of hunger. However harsh their fate among the slaves they had formerly ruled, the palace eunuchs were saved from that which now befell the inhabitants of the great city.

It began almost as soon as the Sephisti had occupied the entire city. The black-clad soldiery moved efficiently through the various quarters, pulled out the entire population, and sent them stumbling up the roads in dense, terrorized groups.

At the city gates, the people were met by a great gang of imps who took control with a cracking of whips and the thudding of clubs. They were roped together at the neck, fed a meal of grain mush from troughs, and then driven to their feet and shoved northwards on the long march to Dzu.

By mid-afternoon, the enemy was assembling trebuchets, catapults, and siege towers on the Zoda. From the walls of the Imperial City, the legionaries could look out at the war machines and feel their hopes sink, hour by hour. It seemed that all was lost. The enemy was determined to overwhelm them in their weakened state. Dark clouds of smoke drifted north from the burning going on in the palace district, to the south of the Imperial City and the Fortress of Zadul. The men were silent, each turned in on himself, making inward farewells to loved ones and the world, preparing for death.

And then at nightfall, like a winged miracle, there came a glimpse of a tall-masted ship to the south, and a breeze brought her canvas crackling out in the unmistakable pattern of a great white ship from Cunfshon. A cheer went up, and the word ran around the walls in seconds. Someone began singing the song of Argonath, and everyone on the walls took it up and bellowed out the words. For a while, work stopped on the siege engines, and the enemy looked up with wonder on their faces.

On the shore by the palace jetty, a crowd accumulated that kept watch for other sails to the south. However, it became clear that this ship was alone, as slowly but steadily, it beat upstream and then glided in to drop anchor about a quarter mile offshore of the city.

The Imperial barge put out at once with Captain Kesepton aboard with a message from Paxion. It returned soon afterward with Captain Peek of the ship, the
Nutbrown
, a cruiser from Cunfshon, detached from her usual trade run across the Bright Sea and sent to Ourdh with a cargo of wheat in her holds for the legions.
Nutbrown
was not one of the largest white ships. Indeed at eight hundred tons, she was less than half the size of such giants as the
Oat
and the
Rye
. Still, she carried enough grain to feed the legions for weeks. If they were able to hold out that long.

The siege continued, and though the city had been lost along with its population, the legions themselves were arguably in a stronger position now, walled up in the Imperial City, than they had been while stretched out around the city’s walls. The capstone to their position was provided by the arrival of the
Nutbrown
, which had given everyone full bellies and a renewed sense of hope. For many, it was as if a bright light had suddenly been lit across a plain of unremitting dark. And with the food came the knowledge that soon, within a day or two, a fleet of white ships, including the giants
Spruce
and
Rye
would arrive, bringing reinforcements and supplies for months.

They just had to hold out until then, if they could. The enemy gave every indication that he would attempt to storm the walls before that moment came. The siege towers were rising quickly in a thunder of hammering.

At a weak spot on the walls near the North Tower, the enemy had set a ram to work, and the walls had begun to collapse quite quickly. General Paxion, by now a gaunt-faced man with haunted eyes, hesitated for a while, agonizing over the risks, and then agreed to the proposal from Captain Kesepton and others that a sortie be mounted before the wall collapsed.

There was a postern gate near the ram, and at dusk it opened. A sortie party of volunteers from the Kadein regiment that had broken and run on the wall, the third, rushed out and fell upon the ram and its operators. Barely a handful escaped, and the ram was torn apart, its major members hewed through by the dragons.

The enemy immediately began rebuilding the ram and posted a large guard force beside it. But the sortie had done its job and bought them a few more hours.

Meanwhile a constant barrage of missiles fell from the sky, crashing here and there into the Imperial City. Here a great stone fell through the roof of an apartment structure crushing dozens of eunuchs, there a slab from a wall of some city building came down and exploded on the flat ground outside the Grand Palace sending loose bricks flying through the guard and passersby.

Of course, the Argonathi engineers had worked to reduce the enemy’s advantage. Sections of stables and eunuch housing had been torn apart, and trebuchets and catapults had been constructed that were busy hurling back many of the missiles that had been tossed into the Imperial City. The Argonathi trained their own weapons on those of the enemy, causing the Sephisti rate of fire to fall drastically after a while.

And yet every few minutes there would be a cry of “beware above,” and everyone would look up at another great chunk of mud-brick wall, ripped from some building, whirling through the air and falling with a great crash somewhere among the palaces and temples of the Imperial City.

The small palaces, the Blue Porcelain, the Green Jade, and the Yellow Lacquer, were all looking badly battered. They were not designed to withstand an assault of this kind. The Grand Palace itself, though more solidly built from the same mud brick as everything else in the city, was looking much the worse for wear, too. But here it was a cosmetic effect; the stucco exterior had been shattered and knocked away in places, revealing the brown and brick beneath. But the walls of the Grand Palace were massive and would withstand considerable bombardment.

The same was true of the small ziggurats for Auros and Gingo-La that occupied the center of the Imperial City. The white stucco that made them shine so brightly in the sunlight was breaking away, but the structures themselves were so massive that the damage was really very slight.

The legions had been quarters in protected places, in the guard quarters along the inner base of the wall and in the towers, especially in the Fortress of Zadul. Some units were in the basements of the palaces, including the Grand Palace.

On Paxion’s orders, the Imperial City’s normal population, the army of priests and slaves who kept the empire’s machineries running, were confined to their quarters except for the eunuchs, who were forced out and pressed into the walled slave compound.

Paxion had set up his headquarters in the Fortress of Zadul and the Marneri men were billeted in the fortress and the gate house. They also held a major weak point, the narrow-sided tower that anchored the southern wall of the Imperial City at the water’s edge. That tower was small and poorly constructed. Its foundations were weak, and it was actually pulling away from the wall itself. It would take little to bring it down in ruin.

The enemy was fashioning a ram just beyond the range of the Argonathi trebuchets. It would be at work within a few hours. Within a day or so at the most, the tower would fall and the enemy would mount an assault.

Still the mood in the Eighth Regiment and the 109th dragons was virtually cheerful. They had been billeted in a basement of the Grand Palace itself. It was a big roomy space, dry and warm. Dusty furniture and enormous rugs had been stored there from previous dynasties. The dragons pushed the stuff up against the walls except for the rugs, which they spread out three deep and lay down on.