Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles (38 page)

“There are hammers and nails in the farrier’s shed,” he said to Uwen. “The hinges are on their side of the doors. Get ladders, if you can find them—timbers, else. Haste!”

“We’ll do our best, m’lord.” Uwen sent the nearest men running and Tristen stared in frustration at the wall and gate that separated them from the South Court. Axes had scarred the center of that gate already, clearly to no avail. The town outside the fortress walls might join them in force if he let them in, but they presented a hazard to the citadel and the lives of the king’s men, with officerless men joining the fray, and with unskilled, unarmored townsfolk Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles pitted against a lord’s armed men. They already risked riot having townsmen behind Guelenfolk at the South and the East Gates, Parsynan was not far from the truth, and he only hoped Anwyll had gotten through unscathed. He did not delude himself the mob would remain peaceful once blood was shed… and at this moment all their affairs and the town’s safety seemed balanced precariously on a knife’s edge, with three of the loyal earls trailing perilously after him, and not so much as a shield among them.

“Protect yourselves!” he shouted at them. “Go back to the stables! ”

And just then a spent arrow struck Lord Drumman a glancing blow in the shoulder. “Get back!”

He could not delay himself further. An ambitious old man, ill prepared, had launched the rebellion for what might seem foolish reasons, but whoever commanded the rebel forces was no fool, and had no shyness at all to seize the best hold on the Zeide itself he could obtain and to harry them with a constant rain of arrows. That told him the mettle of the man in charge, and if he let that officer have room, he feared a rapidly moving attack chasing through the citadel and into an archer’s warfare in the great hall or in the garden and the East Court. Deaths of Guelenfolk or of Amefin could not serve him, a slaughter pressed on him, he suspected, half at least by Lord Parsynan.

But that might happen, it might well happen, the earl having set himself in an impossible position with the king’s authority. There had already been disrespect of the king’s messenger, at very least.

And he had to ask himself how long the other earls, those now at
his
back, would bear Parsynan’s insults. Right now they were Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles supporting a Guelen force in their town, and that was unprecedented. But Amefin pride had bent as far as it could bend.

Meanwhile the thump of unavailing axes alternated with that of hammers attempting the hinges and fittings of the gates—and time they spent at that task gave that rebel officer a chance to lay ambushes, and time wore down his travel-weary men, who had begun to stand about in dazed uncertainty. They had to move.

The stable grain stores
, he said to himself, and went running, a lord’s dignity to the wind. He seized a number of soldiers from the number watching the axemen and brought them along to the stable.

“Open the door of the shed! ” he cried. “Go into the stables! Gather up sacks, barrels, whatever you can lay hands on, and bring them to the wall! Pile them as high as you can!”

They set to, and by the time the shed door was open, Uwen joined him. So did Lusin, Syllan, and his other guards, the banners set by, their hands freed for work as they all, even he, began a rapid conveyance of sacks and planks from the stable yard to the south wall.

“Bring ’em!” Uwen shouted at any man they met, and as exhausted men stared at their piling sacks and barrels below the wall they took the idea and brought anything they could set hand to.

More sacks arrived, a steady stream of stored grain carried to the heap through the hazard of arrows, making a small mountain reinforced by poles from the horse run and the barrow they used for manure. A man went down, an arrow through his arm, his sack spilled, and they carried him away to safety, and carried his sack to Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles the pile. In wild cheerful invention the frustrated Guard began bringing tables and gear from the kitchens, then small barrels from some other place. They heaved a half-constructed ladder up to men atop and near the crest of the wall. The two men who reached the top of the wall shouted for more sacks, more sacks, and as men passed them up, gathering them from scattered elements at the base of the pile, they flung them down on the other side, a steady stream of them, affording a route to the top for more than one man at a time, and a landing on the other side.

Well-done, Tristen thought, seeing his way clear. Encumbered though he was by shield and sword, he climbed up the pile among the Guard passing up the sacks, with the men calling out both first an encouragement and then realizing in dismay that they were being left behind.

He heard Uwen shout that he was coming, as with an elbow atop the narrow wall he had a view of the armory, the smithy, and the earl’s men rushing from the South Gate to the defense of the wall in sudden realization that the assault was on them sooner than expected and that the arrows that struck and shattered there were not enough. The lighter-equipped men who had been flinging down sacks jumped with no more than swords in hand as Tristen heaved himself up to the crest with a thump of the hindering shield. He rolled over the jagged masonry rim and plummeted down to the steep hill of the grain sacks below, leaned back and slid down them to the first brace of his foot and the oncoming assault of the earl’s men. More of his men were landing behind him, one sliding into his back as he braced himself halfway to his feet, trying to deploy his Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles shield for cover to the men by him. Tristen thrust his shield right against the faces of men coming at him in desperate defense. One he flung back with a shove of the shield alone and the man beside him engaged that one; the other won the edge of his sword. For a moment he and two light-armed men were battling a knot of enemy alone, and then Uwen turned up beside him, shield up, sword advanced. Other men came thumping down among the sacks, arraying themselves to shield new arrivals in greater and greater numbers. They pressed forward from the grain sacks, pushed the enemy that had rushed toward them now into a ragged and increasingly disordered retreat. An officer across the yard tried to rally his forces to oppose what was still a small force, but the earl’s men had obstructed their archers, and the hindmost who had rushed up to the attack began immediately not only to give ground, but to run.

“Open the gate!” Tristen shouted at any man who could hear. “Open the gate behind us!”

He thought someone had gone. He led his men forward, across the cobbled South Courtyard into the sporadic fire of archers, at all the speed they could muster. Resistance to their advance collapsed as the last men they pursued ran past the thin ranks of the archers and left them undefended.

Then, officers’ shouts notwithstanding, and with a last, sporadic volley of arrows, the shadows of the yard gave up more and more bowmen who otherwise would have remained concealed, archers joining their sword-and-shield men in retreat until nigh on two hundred men were in sporadic, uncertain rout, giving ground across Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles the yard, past the corner of the building and across its face, running until the rebels’ right flank was against the broad South Stairs and their left was toward the South Gate, all of it so fast-moving that their archers had found no place to stand.

Tristen forged ahead, giving the rebels no space to breathe. At the rebels’ backs was a second curtain wall, the east, its small single gate shut. But the fortress itself offered nearer refuge to men hard-pressed, and the rebel earl’s men pushed and shoved one another atop the South Stairs as they opened the doors to the interior, and men poured in, seeking shelter in the Zeide’s inner halls and the warren of stairs and corridors inside.

He had far rather the retreat had gone to the east, farthermost small gate of the South Court. He had left them that retreat in hope of their fleeing through the second of the two curtain-wall gates into the East Court. But the rebel officer was drawing his men into a warren of stairs and rooms, where traps might be prepared and where he might have something in mind.

But king’s men held the South Court and the West, undisputed.

“Open the all the gates! Open the South
and
the East Gates!”

Tristen pointed with his sword for the sake of the Guelenmen, some of whom did not know the East Gate from the one at their backs.

“Let Captain Anwyll in by the South!
And open up the East
!”

“Get both the gates, lads! Go
let in Cossell
!” Uwen relayed the order in terms the men knew in a voice that echoed off the walls, as their band engaged the last escaping earl’s men on the lower tiers of the South Stairs, the scene of processionals and ceremonies.

Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles

“Forward!” Tristen shouted, and kept pressing up the steps as the rebels inside heaved at the great doors to shut them at the backs of their own hindmost men. Resistance collapsed, men went down, and the last few to reach the other side of the doors tried to push them shut in their faces, but Tristen hewed at the defenders with all his might through the narrowing gap, and Uwen pushed, and more of their men pressed forward and added their weight. The doors gave back and back until courage failed the rebels and the doors gave in a sudden lack of force behind them. They forced jammed doors the rest of the way open, shoving bodies before them and treading over dead and wounded as they reached the dark hall, seeking the enemy.

Then men poured in at their flank, out of the dark. “King’s men!”

Tristen shouted, and “King’s men!” the shout went up on either side, Guelenmen narrowly evading each others’ mistaken attack as the viceroy’s force came in from the west wing to join theirs.

“They’ve gone east!” he heard Uwen shout. “M’lord, rebels is to the Temple court!”

“Dragons with me!” Tristen shouted, and turned his own men toward the deep dark, past the junction of stairs, chasing the distant noise of retreat in a thunderous advance of their own, all the way past what must be the great hall. The retreat echoed differently then, and his ears told him the rebels had reached the end of the hall and the downward stairs to the East Court. “Shields!” he shouted, as they came rushing up. “Stairs to the right!”

Men met them out of the blind dark, rear guard for the men on the stairs, and for a brief, sharp encounter everything was blind, men striking at men they could not see, pushing resisting men down Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles steps and against the upward push of bodies. Tristen struck few blows himself, pushed with his shield, hit with the flat of his blade, his footing unsteady on unseen steps and fallen men entangling the feet of the living. The halls and stairwell rang with shouts and the clash of arms, and the battle anger was so close, so very close he dared not charge headlong. He pushed as much as fought, used his shield, forced the rebels down the narrow stairs to the door he knew was there. He heard Uwen’s voice. He heard the rebels shouting,

“Lord Sihhë!” this time in panic, men pressing ahead at the last by sheer weight.

The earl’s men tried to stand. There was no room. Then a seam of night sky broke behind the heads of the defenders, and widened, as someone opened the east door. A few escaped outward, and now the battle choked into another panic as men jammed the doors to the outside in utter disorder.

Men with more presence of mind tried to rally once more through and shut that door against Tristen’s force, a door which Tristen was equally determined should stand open. He battered them with his shield, pressed back, trampled on the fallen, a moment of extreme peril, and the door, by reason of men fallen in the gap, could not shut again. He reached the open air of the steps, facing the shrines, and a knot of rebels who had run headlong against a fatal wall of Dragon Guard waiting for them, a grim line with shields locked.

Anwyll and Cossell had both come in.

The hammering din of battle and the shouts of armed men spreading out from the doors behind him fell away to a growing, knife-edged silence. A band of maybe sixscore rebels was left standing, half as Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles many more wounded huddled at their feet. He had no doubt that some of the earl’s men had disappeared inside, to lose themselves in the halls. The columned shrines and tombs that towered up on either hand of this small courtyard might have sheltered the rebels: the Bryaltine, the Quinaltine, the Teranthine shrines, next the crypts of holy men and Aswyddim were a maze of narrow aisles. The roofs of the fortress itself might have been to fear, but no attack had come from that direction.

And Cossell had shut the gate again at his back, keeping that way barred from all comers. That wall of Dragon Guard shields was absolute and unyielding.

The silence grew as even smaller movements stopped, throughout, attackers and defenders alike.

Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles
CHAPTER 6

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Where is Earl Edwyll?” Tristen asked the earl’s men from atop the steps. His voice echoed in the quiet of the yard, and he looked on men who could do nothing other than what their lord bade them. He settled no blame there. He was, among other matters, anxious to see the officer who had managed the defense, who, if he had had battle-hardened men, would have made matters far worse than he had.

“Who stands for these men?”

There was some little hesitation, and then swords slanted down disconsolately. But one young man grounded his shield forward of the others, took off his helm one-handed and cast him a defiant look. “Crissand Adiran, thane of Tas Aden, son of Edwyll son of Crissand, son of Edwylls before there ever were Aswyddim in Henas’amef!
I
stand for my father’s men, of the house of Meiden! ”

A strange feeling went through Tristen’s heart then, as if he had heard a spell uttered in the words, in the names, in the Unfolding of a history he might, at some time, in a life before this life, have known, in the titles of a young man who had for a time stood successfully against him.