Forging the Sword (The Farsala Trilogy) (10 page)

The horses were trotting up the wider valley now, their hides dark with sweat, their sides heaving. Jiaan couldn’t yet see the Hrum who followed them, but he saw the glance Fasal shot over his shoulder, and his stomach clenched in excitement. They weren’t far behind.

The horses neared the canyon’s entrance. It was wide enough to admit horses, and Jiaan had planned for his men to ride them in, even though it would mean killing the horses in the end, for when the rock fell there would be no way out of the sheer-walled trap. But Fasal had refused, claiming that if the horses were tired enough the Hrum wouldn’t be suspicious when the Farsalans abandoned them. Since Jiaan had placed Fasal in charge of bringing the Hrum into the snare, he had let him have his way—and had been grateful to do so, truth be told.

From his place beside the huge boulder, Jiaan watched as Fasal leaped off his horse—not his precious mare, not in anything this risky. The others were already running through the narrow gap into the canyon, but Fasal spent valuable moments guiding the horses toward the wider route, slapping their rumps, sending them on down the track that led to a valley where they could be reclaimed.

Perhaps he had delayed so long that the Hrum saw him darting into the crevice. Perhaps they had been tracking the running men so long that the fact that the horse tracks went one way and the men’s another wasn’t enough to confuse them, even for an instant—though they probably thought that was what the Farsalans intended. Whatever they thought, the only thing that slowed them as they jogged forward was the fact that five men couldn’t pass through the narrow gap abreast.

Jiaan watched, impressed in spite of himself, as the left line of the running column sheered off to one side, formed new ranks as the others passed through, and then followed after them. Two hundred men through that narrow crevice in only a handful of seconds with no confusion. Jiaan hadn’t even heard any orders. The Hrum were accustomed to moving in formation, but it was still remarkable. He knew his Farsalans, even the best trained among them, couldn’t have done it nearly as well.

He looked down to the far end—the dead end of the small canyon. His men might not move well in formation, but they were very competent in other things. The first of Fasal’s troop were just being hauled over the lip of the cliff on the long ropes, and even Fasal, who had doubtless insisted on going up last, was halfway up the cliff face and rising rapidly as the Farsalans who weren’t archers drew him up.

The archers, Jiaan knew, were already in position, and the
stream of silver helmets was already almost fifty yards from the canyon’s entrance. Jiaan fought down a desire to wipe his sweaty palms on his britches and turned to the Suud.

“Pull the rope,” he said.

They had threaded the rope behind some of the small stones that underlay the forward edge of the great boulder—not a hard task, for if you lay down and looked at the right angle, you could see daylight on the other side.

Now half a dozen Suud, hands and faces invisible in their thick robes, grabbed the ends of the rope and pulled. Jiaan heard a grinding sound, but nothing else happened.

Jiaan waved another eight of his Farsalans to the rope. He’d wanted them there in the first place, but the Suud had said it was their rock and they wanted to push it!

They would soon get the chance. The angle was bad, for the boulder was near enough to the cliff that the men on the rope were only a few feet from the edge—Jiaan was glad he wasn’t one of them. But more than a dozen men now had hold of the rope, hauling in unison. The smaller rocks grated, snapped, then flew across the canyon, striking the opposite wall as if flung from a giant sling.

The great boulder seemed so precariously balanced that Jiaan held his breath, thinking it might fall of its own weight—but it simply sat, with the placid immobility of stone.

The Hrum commander had stopped, almost three hundred
yards into the narrow canyon, and was gazing up at the sheer walls that surrounded him. “Back!” he shouted suddenly in Hrum. “Go back! It’s a
neret
!”

Jiaan realized that he had just learned the Hrum word for trap, but he had no time to dwell on it.

“Push the rock,” he commanded. “Now!”

The men who held the rope dropped it and swarmed back, even though they weren’t in the boulder’s path. Jiaan sympathized. If something that big was going to move, he’d prefer to be well out of its way.

He stepped back himself, as a handful of Suud and as many of his Farsalans as could find a space behind the boulder ran forward and shoved with all their might.

The rock didn’t budge.

The men leaned down and laid their shoulders against the back of the boulder, thrusting with their thighs, and others found spaces to add their hands to the rock and push.

The rock didn’t budge, and the Hrum were coming back toward the entrance of the canyon.

“Archers!” Jiaan shouted. “Now!”

The arrows rained down, fast and hard. But the men below were armored, and many had already raised their shields, expecting the attack. There were a few cries of pain, but not enough to stop the troop. The Hrum were about to escape.

“Push!” Jiaan ran to the boulder himself. There was no open
space behind it, but he found a place to brace his hands against it, pushing it toward the cliff with all his strength. It was like trying to push the earth itself—not the slightest hint of yielding, no cracking from the fragile stones beneath it. But it looked so precarious!

Jiaan heard the clatter of armored men running. It sounded as if they were right under his feet.

The Hrum were escaping. He pushed on the boulder, the muscles in his back clenched with effort. The rock wasn’t moving, and despair sapped Jiaan’s strength.

Then one of the shrouded Suud stepped up beside Jiaan and laid his cloth-covered hands on the rock—lightly, not pushing at all.

Perhaps he was trying to feel a hint of motion, some sign that the rock would give way—but there was no motion, no sign. Jiaan was about to step back and order the others off, when all of a sudden the rock shifted.

“Heave!” he cried, his voice all but lost in the grunts of effort around him. It was probably the most unnecessary order he’d ever given, for the others had already redoubled their efforts. Slowly, slowly, the great rock tipped. Slowly, but gathering speed, it over-turned, ground its way down the slope to the top of the cliff, and then toppled into the canyon.

The echoes of the crash blended with the ringing in Jiaan’s ears, but he heard other rocks falling as well.

He walked carefully to the edge of the cliff and looked down.

The Hrum who had escaped were fleeing down the canyon, perhaps fearing a further barrage of arrows. Jiaan wished he had thought to place archers on those ridges. He couldn’t make a precise count of the mass of running men, but it was clear that most of the Hrum had escaped—Razm, djinn of cowardice, take them. It had been such a good plan too!

He walked down the ridgetop and looked at the canyon on the other side. The boulder had not only blocked the entrance, as Jiaan had known it would, it had also brought down several large slabs of the cliff with it, creating an impassable slope—at least for men who would have to make that climb with hundreds of archers shooting at them.

Looking down into the canyon, Jiaan saw that most of the men there had no hope of climbing. Three of them were seated, two clutching bloodstained arrows in thigh and calf. The only man still on his feet was wrapping a strip of cloth around the arm of a third man, where an arrow had evidently passed though.

The man finished with the awkward bandage and then stepped back, looking up at the Farsalan soldiers who lined the canyon. Or more accurately, at the hundreds of bows, arrows nocked and pointed right at him. His shoulders moved slightly, something between a shrug and a nervous twitch. Very slowly, he drew his sword and laid it on the ground. Then he removed his helmet and placed it next to the sword.

“That’s the Hrum commander!” Fasal’s breathless voice exclaimed. He must have run over the ridgetop at reckless speed to get here so swiftly. “He’s surrendering! What do we do?”

“We accept,” said Jiaan. “We lower some ropes and haul him and his people out of there.” He looked around for the man who had laid his hands on the rock, but the Suud were anonymous in their robes unless you noticed the pattern of the stripes, and Jiaan had been too busy for that.

Fasal, still looking down the canyon, snorted. “He pulled the wounded back when the rocks started to fall. He could have made it out himself, and as commander it was his duty to escape. And now he’s surrendering, the stinking coward.”

“Sometimes,” said Jiaan, “it takes more courage to surrender than to fight.” He remembered the night after the battle of the Sendar Wall. Dying had seemed so easy then, and living so hard. Did this Hrum commander feel that way now?

“
Our
commander fought to the death!” said Fasal proudly.

Jiaan made no reply.

T
HEY HAD INTENDED
to sneak past the sentries at night, but with the early winter storm beginning to build, Kavi had urged them to try it during the rain.

“Sentries who’re all wet and miserable aren’t thinking about anything except getting dry,” he told them.

The girl had been dubious, but the Suud agreed with him.

“Storm noise stop noise you make, and water in eyes much good than dark.” Daralk spoke in Faran, out of courtesy to the local farmer who had agreed to act as their guide. The Suud were a courteous folk, Kavi had found, though he was pretty sure that when Daralk said “you,” he was referring to Kavi alone. But if he was making that small joke, Kavi could hardly blame him, for the Suud made no more noise than mice in the dry brush, and the lady Soraya was almost as skilled.

Kavi had been skeptical, then stunned, and finally delighted when the things the girl and Maok had told him about his own gift had proved no joke at all. Working steel again, even if he could only do it with that odd part of his mind that Maok had awakened, had been as much pain as pleasure, especially at first. But if part of his heart ached for his lost craft, another part took consolation in teaching the Suud. They needed steel, and even with the most primitive equipment they had learned as fast as any apprentices Kavi had seen. It had been a relaxed, pleasant time, and he was grateful for it.

But he also knew they had reached the limit of what they could accomplish in the desert. If the Farsalans were to get strong swords in time to do them any good, it would take a town, a metal-working town, to make them.

So now, as the sky opened up and the cold, dreary rain of a winter storm pelted down, Kavi crouched behind a screen of leafless branches and stared at the sentry standing on the road. Who would have thought the Hrum would post a guard this far outside the city?

“It’s the siege camp’s new commander,” said the farmer softly. “He doesn’t know how we were getting food in—they’ve not learned about the aqueduct—but that bastard Nehar reported to the Hrum whenever we did, and the commander kept pushing his sentry lines out and out, until they ended up between us and the
tunnel hatch.” He frowned. “We haven’t gotten a shipment in for over a month now. The odd lad bringing messages can get through, but nothing like a big load of foodstuffs. With the new taxes, food’s getting harder to come by anyway. And there are more patrols out as well.”

Rain was beginning to drip down Kavi’s face, but he thought the guard should be allowed to get a bit wetter before they tried anything. “What’s the food—”

A bolt of lightning flashed and thunder rumbled, loud enough to make Kavi flinch. The winter rains didn’t usually have much lightning in them—slow and sullen they were—but this early storm seemed livelier than most. The girl was studying the sky. She had flinched at the lightning too, and now she seemed tense, but Kavi found her very hard to read these days. She’d been better company after he’d broken her out of Garren’s slave pen—gratitude and all. But that was before she’d decided to kill him. Deghan gratitude was a fickle thing.

“What’s the food situation in Mazad?” he asked, “if they’re not getting any more supplies?”

The farmer rubbed his grizzled chin. From his days as an apprentice in the city, Kavi knew the man. He recognized the mannerism as one that heralded bad news.

“Not so good, I fear,” the farmer admitted. “They’ve still got a lot of their stockpile, of course. But our shipments were never
enough to feed a city that size—at best, we were only helping stretch things a bit. And now the stockpile’s beginning to run low. I heard that Commander Siddas wanted to start rationing, but the governor won’t allow it. Of course, he’s got his reasons.”

Kavi nodded. “Did they ever find out how Governor Nehar was communicating with the Hrum? Last I heard, Siddas was planning on catching him in the act, and using that to turn the better men in the garrison against him.”

“Oh, they found out,” said the farmer. “For all the good it did. Nehar ties a letter around an arrow shaft and has one of his guardsmen shoot it out into the ruins. Some spot the Hrum know to check. But it’s been impossible to catch him at it, for he only uses his own lads, the ones whose loyalty he’s sure of. And even if anyone thought to question a guardsman shooting an arrow from the walls, why, he saw something move in the ruins and thought he might be spying a Hrum attack. But no one yelled, so it was likely nothing but a rabbit or a cat, and nothing to worry about.”