Colours in the Steel (66 page)

‘The boat’s not actually down by the docks,’ Venart said in a loud, hoarse whisper. ‘That’d be inviting people to come and grab it. So I told the boatmen to hide up under the arches of the long jetty, where I reckoned nobody’d see them. Mind you, I wasn’t expecting a wholesale panic like this.’

Fortuitously the current of the stampede swept them directly towards the long jetty. Some fool had started a fire, accidentally or deliberately, in one of the warehouses, and its light reflected off the water was good enough to see by for some way. ‘There,’ Venart hissed. ‘Oh, gods, there’s people trying to get on it, just as I feared. Come on.’

Alexius saw a small longboat, six oars each side, standing off about fifteen yards from the jetty. Around it in the water men and women were swimming; some of them were trying to scramble over the side of the boat, and the oarsmen were hitting them with boathooks, the butt-ends of oars, even the wooden clogs from their feet. Venart shouted and waved; by chance one of the oarsmen looked up and saw him, and shouted to his fellows. They dislodged the remaining swimmers with difficulty and quite a lot of force, and rowed towards the point where Venart and Alexius stood.

‘This’ll be the tricky part,’ Venart muttered. ‘I don’t suppose you’re up to swimming.’

‘Not really, no.’

‘Pity.’ Quite a few people were watching the boat coming in, others were scrambling to get to the front. It was the pushing and shoving behind them, in fact, that launched Venart and Alexius unexpectedly into the water, solving one problem but creating another.

Alexius felt the water close above his head.
Ah, well
, he thought,
it was worth trying, I suppose. But I knew it wasn’t going to do any good
. Then he became aware of something pinching hard on his arm, and he was moving, being towed (still under the water) in the direction that he seemed to remember the boat being in. Since he was effectively dead already, of course, he could afford to be relaxed about the whole thing—

—Until he felt the first mouthful of water enter his lungs, and the panic, which happened at almost precisely the moment when his head broke through the water back into the air, and many hands grabbed him and hauled him upwards; then a bump as he hit the planks of the boat, and someone pushing down on his chest - trying to kill him? No, this was something to do with getting water out of his lungs. It was all rather unpleasant, and he wasn’t entirely sorry when his eyes blacked over and he lost consciousness.

 

 

The Prefect wiped the blood out of his eyes and looked down the wall, towards the bridgehouse, and then up, to where Loredan’s bastion used to be. On both sides, he could see large contingents of the enemy, each party outnumbering the force he’d managed to rally around watchtower sixteen.

Under different circumstances, he could justifiably claim to have done enough. Four simultaneous assaults from both directions by superior forces had been repelled, at minimal loss to the defenders. Enemy casualties had been heavy, not that that signified particularly; what did it matter how many were killed when they still kept coming?

Having assessed the situation and made what preparations he could, the Prefect took stock of his own condition, which wasn’t good. He’d taken a blow from an axe just above the rim of his helmet; the axe hadn’t penetrated, but the jagged edge of a crumpled piece of helmet trim had sliced deeply into his forehead, and the blood from the cut was making it hard for him to see. A short-range arrow had hit him in the ribs; again, the mailcoat had turned it, but the baffled impact had cracked at least one rib, possibly two, which made breathing a painful matter. He’d turned his ankle, which didn’t help, and pulled a muscle in his shoulder parrying a sword-cut from a much stronger man. As far as he was aware, none of the handful of offensive strokes he’d managed to make had done anybody any harm, but at least he was still alive.

He’d known for the last half-hour that he was going to die. Defeat is a gradual thing; it begins with the apprehension that things could be going better, develops into the perception that the situation is not favourable and that action must be taken to redress the balance; then, gradually, the emphasis shifts from
they would appear to have an advantage
to
we might still win this if we pull something special out of the hat
. Then, one by one, the possibilities for salvation are cancelled, until a point is reached where the brain acknowledges that realistically there can only be one outcome. After that, it scarcely matters whether the vanquished party fights bravely to the last or stands still and allows itself to be slaughtered. If they fight on, it’s for revenge (or spite, at any rate), or the instinctive feeling that falling in battle is somehow preferable, in some strange way
better for you
than being made to kneel in rows until someone yanks your head back by the hair and cuts your throat. And, even at the end, there’s a misguided glimmer of hope. The beating of the heart and the action of the lungs are a comforting prevarication, giving an impression of options being kept open.

The enemy came on for the fifth time; and as the Prefect shouted the order to form lines, his voice was weary. Before this night, he wouldn’t have believed it was possible to feel tired during a battle; there would always be the rush of excitement and terror that would damp down the pain in the arms and knees, compensate for the shortness of breath and the pain of wounds and injuries. Well; the first four times, possibly. The fifth and last time, no. Perhaps when the outcome is so patently obvious, the body can no longer make the effort.

Why haven’t they used archers to clear us off?
he wondered. True, it was dark, not enough light to make out individual targets; but a line of men jammed close together on the walkway presented a target any archer could hit with his eyes shut. There were various possible explanations; archers more urgently needed elsewhere, run out of arrows, an unimaginative captain or an intimate-combat fetishist. Made no odds, really.

As the enemy came in - walking, not running, which gave the whole thing an unnaturally calm, almost serene feeling - the Prefect tightened his grip on his sword-hilt and promised himself he’d do his best, this being his last opportunity. All his adult life he’d dealt in honour and service, the way a furrier deals in furs or a vintner in wine. On his lips the terms had had specialised political meanings, and he’d long since stopped thinking about what the words stood for in the world at large. Now, unfortunately a little bit too late, he’d been granted a little gleam of insight; service is what makes you stand in the line when nobody would try and stop you if you ran away, and honour is what’s left when every other conceivable reason for staying there has long since evaporated.

Oh, well, here we go
. A man loomed up out of the darkness, a shape under a leather cap, an arm thrusting with a halberd. The Prefect parried, realised the thrust was a feint, found it was too late to do anything about it. Now he was slumped against the parapet, still alive but suddenly too weak to move. The man had moved on, stepping over him and preparing to engage the next man who got in his way; he was no longer concerned with the Prefect, who was as good as dead and therefore no longer a factor needing to be taken into account.

I don’t think I’m going to be all right this time
.

I wonder if
. . .

I
. . .

 

It’s going to be all right
—

It had been close. Another ten minutes or so and the enemy would have rounded them up like sheep in a pen; but the counterattack by Ceuscai’s men (who must have finally cleared the wall, or else they wouldn’t be here) had come, not perhaps at the last moment, but fairly close to it. Now the enemy had fallen back; they’d lost fewer men and inflicted an alarming amount of damage, but the important part of it was that they’d been forced to retreat. In effect, it was an admission that they could no longer defend the landward side of the lower city. Which meant, in turn, that if Ceuscai’s people now controlled the wall, all exits from the city apart from the docks were cut off. The number who could escape through the docks was strictly limited by the number of ships and the space available on them, and the rest had nowhere to go but uphill. It’s going to be all right.

Temrai wrapped a strip of cloth around the cut on his arm, using his teeth to draw the knot tight. It was a scratch, nothing more; the jagged edge of a damaged shield, dragged across him in the squash as they bundled through the hole in the wall. So far, he hadn’t come within arm’s length of the enemy, and for that he was extremely grateful.

‘All right,’ he said, raising his voice to make himself heard. ‘Heads of companies to me, now. Captains, you’ve got five minutes to sort yourselves out and then we’re moving on. Anybody seen Bosadai? No? Oh, right. In that case, you two are in charge of arrow supplies; get some squads organised to pick up what you can find and pass them around.’

The heads-of-companies meeting was short and to the point. Now that the hard work had been done, it was almost time to wrap it up; in fact, by the time the carters had returned to camp, loaded up the stuff and come back, it ought to be time. And then it would be finished.

 

Loredan stepped forward, putting his weight on his front foot and lunging. The other man was off balance and couldn’t have made an effective parry even if he’d known how to. The first seven inches of the blade went in just below his throat, in the gap where the collarbones meet. He slid off the blade and dropped, making way for the next one.

It’s all very well killing people, but we’re losing this
. They weren’t just coming in twos and threes; the flow was continuous, and as soon as one went down there was another behind him and two squashing through on either side. Loredan stopped using the thrust and switched to slashes only; less risk of getting the blade stuck, and what he wanted was wounded men still on their feet and impeding the scrum rather than more corpses getting in his way and upsetting his balance. No place for finesse or precision in a ruck; hard swipes off the back foot, keep the blade moving fast, as close to the body as possible to make it harder to parry effectively, and, if possible, hit them around the face and neck, where it hurts and frightens most.

Dimly he was aware that the man next to him in the line had gone down, which meant his right side was exposed. He stepped back three paces, covering his retreat with a powerful slash that connected with something soft. He realised that he was resigned to the fact that the counterattack, which was more or less their last realistic chance, wasn’t going to happen now; the wall had definitely fallen, so even if they did somehow push the enemy back down the hill, all that’d happen would be that ultimately they’d be enfiladed by archers on the wall, pinned down and surrounded. The plain truth was that there were too many of the enemy now inside the city for his forces to push out again.

Without knowing why, he ducked. As he did so, a poleaxe flashed over the top of his bent neck, slicing the air just where his chin would have been. He estimated where the poleaxe-user must be and lunged at that extrapolated spot, dropping on one knee as he did so just in case the other man had a friend. The blade went into something; he twisted it sharply to the left and freed it, then moved smartly right out of the way of a lance-thrust. He was getting left behind again, which wouldn’t do at all. From his kneeling position he sprang backwards, taking a chance on landing cleanly, and made it. As he landed he swung his sword again, feeling a jarring shock as it rang on a helmet.

Up the hill, then; and once they started on that road they might as well call it a day. Even if they were able to get the second-city gate closed and manned the wall, it’d only be a matter of time. They’d be penned up in a smaller, less advantageous siege, with no prospect of supply or eventual relief. The best they could hope to achieve by holding the second city would be slightly more favourable terms of surrender.

Then to hell with this
, Loredan said to himself;
nothing more I can do, so let’s just see if there’s a hope in hell of getting through to the docks and out of here
.

Easier said than done. It wasn’t just a matter of deciding he didn’t want to play any more; he still had to find a way through the attack and round the hill. Quite possibly he’d left it too late, in which case he might as well lower his sword and get it over with. But that went against the grain, somehow; it was offensive to all the instincts he’d acquired over a decade in the legal profession. It would be tantamount to throwing the fight.

There was only one way he could think of, and if it didn’t work he was finished. On the other hand, he wasn’t exactly spoilt for choice. First he let fly with a broad sweep, very hard and slightly wild; it connected, sure enough, and while the other man was plunging about in panic with half his face carved off, Loredan dropped to his knees, his face only a few inches above the mat of corpses and nearly corpses. He found himself looking into the eyes of a man - one he’d just seen to? Quite possibly, no way of knowing, and did it matter? - who was still just about alive, his eyes wide in a horrified stare, his lips moving without sound, as if he was trying to pass on some tremendous revelation about death. Loredan crawled over him, first a hand on his face, then a knee, and then onwards, scrabbling and slithering over the dead and dying—

—
This is adding insult to injury, Bardas. Bad enough to be facing the greatest of all horrors, alone, frightened and in pain, without having some uncaring stranger kneeling on your face while you’re at it
—

—For what seemed like hours, with shuffling feet and knees kicking and banging into him, stepping over his head, treading on his outstretched fingers. Still, it had to be done, and so long as nobody looked down, so long as they assumed he was just another nearly dead man wriggling about underfoot, there was a chance he might even get away with it.