The Silent Isle (26 page)

When the
shriken
fell, Paul had a fleeting glimpse of the courtyard from his hiding place. 
He saw Tanlin Hall running for the door behind which Josie and the others
hid.  He saw two
shriken
pulling one of the doors of the southern
gate open.  He did not see any humans still standing about the gate. 
The flagpole above the gate had been hacked down and lay with its banner in the
mud of the courtyard.  Then the opening was blocked by the body of another
enemy.  Paul fired again, then again before the body hit the ground. 
As he reloaded (a difficult thing in that narrow space) a sickle shot in with
the speed of a striking snake, hooked around one arm of his bow, and yanked bow
and body into the open.

***

Josie stood in
front of Elias’s bed.  She was facing the door.  She did not remember
loading the bow or bringing it to her shoulder, but she realized now that she
had.  Outside were terrible noises.  Some of them sounded like men
fighting and some of them sounded like men dying and some of them did not sound
like noises that could be torn from the throats of men at all.  Part of
her wished she had some view of what was going on out there and part of her was
glad she did not.  Then
came
the worst noise of
all.  It started with a pounding on the door.  Josie tightened her
grip on the bow-stock.  The pounding continued but was joined by a new
noise. 
“Lemme in, lemme in, lemme in.”
 

The boy buried
himself against Molly Thatcher, who sat on the floor against the wall with her
arms around him.  The pleading at the door continued.  Josie glanced
from the door to Leech, who stood beside her.  Leech nodded.  He
started towards the door.  From outside there came a scream cut suddenly
short and then silence.

***

When Paul was
jerked from his hole, the
shriken
struck him a glancing blow with its
flail that knocked him to the ground.  The creature stood over him now,
pinning him on his back with its foot pressed against his shoulder.  It
was so absurd.  It was like a giant chicken foot.  If Paul had not
been about to die, and had his brother not been lying dead a few feet away, he
might have laughed out loud.  Instead he snaked his arm around the front
of the leg, holding it fast, and drove his free shoulder against the
knee.  There was a popping crack and the creature lurched sideways and
fell with a shriek that almost made Paul regret his actions.  Before he
could sit up, a second creature dealt him a blow with its flail that sent his
whole left side tingling.  It pinned him with its clawed foot at his
throat.  The dark eyes seemed to smile at him as the sickle
rose
high above his head. 

Something that
from Paul’s vantage point seemed the size of a young pine trunk hit the
creature in the chest with a whizzing thud and threw it off of him.  He
rolled onto his stomach and saw, standing in the open gateway, two figures that
he’d thought he’d never see again. 

Dane and Mara
had entered the battle.

But the battle
was over.  Something was happening to the creatures.  They threw
their heads back and screamed fit to shatter men’s skulls.  Paul buried
his ears beneath his hands and tried to roll his head up inside his body like a
porcupine.  But worse than the screaming was the voices he heard shrieking
in his head: 
She knows.  She knows.  She knows.

The creatures
inside the courtyard leapt back onto the wall and disappeared over it. 
The creatures that were still on the wall followed them.  Dane held only
his knife and Mara held no weapon, but the creatures did not rush them or try
for the open gateway.  In a few seconds there were no
shriken
left
in the compound save the slain.

The men and
women who still had breath in their lungs were too shocked and weary to cheer
their victory.  Paul pushed himself to his feet and staggered to his
brother’s body.  Rawl was lying on his back but his head was bent so that
his face was pressed into the mud beneath him.  Paul knelt beside him and
pulled the lifeless body into his arms.

With crystal
clarity he heard
a door open and running footsteps
behind him.  He looked over his shoulder to see Josie standing a few feet
from him.  He turned back to his brother, but he was aware of others
behind him now.  Mara knelt beside him.  At first he thought she was
talking to him, but when he looked up he saw she was looking at Rawl. 

“It is not yet
your time,” she said.  “Come back to us, Child.”  She took Rawl’s
head in her hands.  She twisted suddenly and there was a wrenching pop
that made Paul close his eyes to stave off nausea, but when he opened them, the
clear blue eyes of his younger brother were looking up at him through a mask of
mud.  Paul almost let go of him in surprise.  Then he hugged him
tighter. 

“I thought you
were dead.”

Rawl laughed. 
“I think I was.”

Rawl leaned his
head back and spotted Josie.  His brother helped him to his feet. 

“I’m fine,
really,” he said to Paul.

Josie put her
arms around him and kissed him in front of everyone. 
Mud
and all.

There was a
moment’s silence. 

“What about the
others?” Paul asked, looking at Mirela.

“I can only move
where the energy is flowing,” she said.  “I cannot bend it to my will.”

“Speaking of the
others,” Leech said softly to Dane, “We’d better take a walk.”

The two friends
walked back past the room Elias lay in and then circuited the wall-walk. 
Tanlin Hall was dead, his handless body laying face-down in the mud. 
Haley Stearn, a man Dane had hardly spoken to since landing on Haven, was
dead.  Kit Forsythe was dead.  The bastards had impaled his body on
the jagged stump of the flag pole.  Dirk Ridder was dead.  Fish, the
cook, breathed his last with Dane kneeling over him and Leech holding his
hand.  Lane Townsby had a smashed hand.  Leech said he would wrap it
tightly with a splint.  At this Lane asked if Leech could just bind his
sword in place there. 

At the end of
their circuit, Dane and Leech came upon Owen Manies’s still form.  He was
lying
face-down on the wall-walk and there was a large dent
in the side of his helmet.  His dog, Wink, lay beside him, dead a dozen
times over.  Leech stooped to turn Owen over but as he did the young man
groaned and stirred.  He rolled onto his back and moaned again, his hands
going to his head.  Leech helped him remove his helmet.  He
groaned.  “Did I miss the whole thing?”    

Dane and Leech
helped him sit up and pivot so he could lean against the wall.  Leech gave
him some water.  Owen flexed his legs.  The movement caused him to
screw up his face and groan. 

“What’s wrong?”
Leech asked.

“My foot,” Owen
said. 
“My right foot.
  The ankle, I think.”

Leech gently
helped him extend his leg and removed his boot.  The ankle was already
badly swollen. 

“Is it broken?”

“Might be,”
Leech said, pressing it gently between his fingers. 

“That worthless
foot,” Owen said. 
“Gives me nothing but trouble.
 
Let’s just have it off at the knee, Doc.”

Leech
smiled.  “I’d say give it a month or so and you should be right as rain.”

“In that case,
give me a crutch and have Bailus
teach
me to fight
left-handed.  Or get me a chair and a good spot on the wall and let me
work them over with a crossbow.”  Then he noticed Wink.  He gave a
little cry and turned his face away.  “That damn dog,” he said. 
“Never could walk away from a fight.”

“He’s probably
the reason you’re still alive,” Leech said.

Owen rolled onto
his stomach and dragged himself on his elbows to where his dog lay.  He
buried his face in the bloody fur.

Dane and Leech
left Owen in the care of Tipper and Dioji.  Dioji and his master stood at
a respectful distance, giving Owen space and time to mourn his fallen
companion.  As soon as they were alone, Dane turned to Leech.  “Bax
is out in the woods.”

Leech watched
his face for a moment to be sure of his meaning and then nodded slowly.

“I think it
should be the two of us.  I mean, that go and get him.”

Leech nodded
again.

Dane ordered the
survivors to prepare the bodies for burial and to dig six graves.

When he and
Leech returned from the woods, he found Mirela.  “We’re going to bury Bax
now,” he said.  “No one expects you to be there, but I thought I should
let you know.”

She only nodded.

She walked
beside him out to the little cemetery in the meadow.  They buried the dog
first, then the men from youngest to oldest.  This made Forsythe last and
Bax the middle.  In Elias’s absence, Dane felt compelled to say something
about each man.  When the funerals were finished the survivors slowly
departed.  Dane stood by Bax’s grave a long time.  When none remained
but Mirela, he knelt and whispered to the fresh-turned earth.  “I’m sorry,
Bax.  I never understood.  I never tried.”

He rose and held
out his hand to her. 

“I never loved
Bax,” she said.  “But I tried not to hate him either.” 

She took his
hand, and they walked back to the settlement.

Paul and Rawl
were waiting for him in the gate.  “Sir,” Paul said.  “We have an
idea.”

“Two ideas,
actually,” said Rawl.

“Alright,” Dane
said.

“We think
they’re afraid of water, sir,” Rawl said.

Dane
nodded.  He remembered the shadowy form which had crept up to the stream in
the dark that night but would go no further.

“So, we thought
we could build a moat.”

“A moat?”
Dane said.

“Yes, sir,” Rawl
said.  “We could dig a trench around the settlement and divert the stream
into it.”

Dane
nodded.  “I’m afraid we’d all be dead-tired or just plain dead long before
we finished.”

Rawl
sighed.  “We had another idea, too,” Paul said. 
“Fishing
nets.
  We’d extend them on poles out from the top of the
wall.  Create an overhang, as it were.  An overhang we could shoot
through.  I think it might give them some trouble.”

Dane did not
know if this would work or not, but he agreed to it.  For the rest of the
day, after the
shriken
corpses had been dragged out and thrown in a heap
to one side of the meadow, all able bodies who were not caring for the wounded
worked to wedge and lash pointed poles between the logs near the top of the
wall.  These stuck out from the wall and upward at a slight angle. 
There were bundles of nets in one of the storage rooms and the men spread these
over the poles, binding and nailing them in place.

There was still
more to be done by the time darkness fell, but night brought a pause to their
labor.  Dane posted a double guard although he doubted there would be any
attack until the following day.

At Leech’s
urging he went to bed earlier than he yet had on the island.  His rest was
bittersweet.  That night, he dreamed of Loshōn.

Dane’s dream was a nightmare made
more of sound than sight.  He could see things, but it was always as
though he was looking at them from a long way off or watching them from under
the water. 

He heard the
horn calling the men to arms.  He heard Bailus’s voice booming.  Then
there was a silence full of doubt and expectation.  He heard the snaps as
the stone-throwers loosed their missiles, the whistle-whine of them incoming,
and then the wrenching, tearing scream of splintered wood and twisted iron as
the doors of the stronghold were smashed to matchwood.  He heard Bailus
give the order to open the rear gate and felt and heard the press of frightened
people there:  men, women, children, Avery; all ready to flee the doomed
fortress and make for the hills. 

He heard the
screaming and crying as they ran. 
The sounds of
confusion.
  And then it was as though he had a panorama of the
disaster and saw everything as it happened all at once.  He saw Bailus and
the garrison standing in the ruined gateway, giving better than they got. 
He saw Torin Felcrist, frustrated and anxious, draw half his force away from
the carnage at the gate and lead them, his horse foremost, against the figures
which fled on foot. 

Then there were
only two figures amidst a mass of dark, swelling shapes and forces.  Dane
saw a young boy running and knew he was in the center of the press of desperate
fugitives.  The boy looked over his shoulder at the screams that arose
from the crowd but could see nothing for the press of taller bodies around
him.  Dane heard the hoofbeats of a single horse as distinct from the
other noises as though they were the only sound the world had ever known. 
He saw the boy, Avery, once more.  Then Dane saw the horse careen through
the mass of bodies; saw Torin Felcrist swinging his sword like he was felling
wheat.  The horse surged forward, stamping more ruin than Torin’s
sword.  Bodies thrown aside, knocked down, crushed.  The uproar was
terrible. 

Then, above it
all, he heard Avery scream. 

Silence.

Dane jerked
upright in bed.  His clothes clung to his skin.  Outside it was
starting to get light.  He splashed his face and dressed and stepped
outside as the first hint of sun came over the trees to the east.

Before the
morning was half spent, the workers ran out of nets.  The areas above both
gates and facing the meadow were covered but large gaps remained
elsewhere. 

“Sir,” said Rawl
to Dane, “I know where to get more nets.”

“You do?”

“On the beach.
  They were stored under the rowboats.”

“They might be
long gone then.”

“Let me and Paul
run down there and at least check.”

Tipper, Josie, and Mirela, all who were standing nearby, volunteered
in the same breath.

Dane had a bad
feeling about letting the two women go, especially Mirela, but he ignored
it.  The best way to thank them for all they’d already done was to let
them help more. 

“Go straight
there,” he told Rawl.  “If the nets are too heavy, come straight back and
we’ll take out the cart and donkey.”

Dane watched the
five figures head out through the open gateway.  All but Mirela carried a
crossbow.  He wanted to go with them, if only for a walk in the woods, but
there were too many things to oversee in the settlement.  He signaled the
sentries to close the gate as the five disappeared down the trail.  He
watched until the gate was barred.  He felt a growing sense of dread in
his gut, like cold water leaking into his stomach.  He pushed it down and
wrote it off as merely the apprehension they all lived under while on this
island.  Turning, he made his way swiftly to the new infirmary.

Leech had set up
shop in the room Rawl had helped him move into yesterday.  The windowless
room was more secure than the original, larger infirmary.  Leech had
splinted and bound Lane’s and Owen’s broken bones yesterday, and the two men
had been moving around the courtyard the whole morning, Owen hobbling on his
crutch, trying to be helpful and mostly just getting in people’s way. 
Leech and Molly had brought in three more beds and were making them up.  A
bundle of bandages, fresh-made by tearing up old sheets, lay on one of the
tables.  A large pot of water was heating over the fire.

Dane went to
Elias’s bedside.  The priest had not stirred or opened his eyes since
Josie and the twins had pulled him from the harbor.  His breathing was
steady like one who sleeps, but it seemed unnaturally shallow.  Dane did
not know if he had come to see if there had been any improvement or to see if
Elias had suddenly and silently slipped away forever.  Finding neither had
occurred, he sat at the bedside for a time and then rose and went silently out
the door. 

The five were
nearly to the beach. 

***

“The thing is,”
Paul was saying, “Even if these nets haven’t been turned to ash along with
everything else, we still won’t have enough to cover the gaps.”

“I’ve been
thinking about that, too,” Rawl said.  “But I think it will be alright.”

“Alright for
them,” Paul said.

“Didn’t you
notice how they attacked yesterday?” Rawl said.  “There were wide gaps
between all of us.  But they didn’t go for those.  They came right at
us.  I don’t think they were so interested in getting onto or over the
wall as they were in closing with us.”

“And that’s
supposed to help us how?” Paul said.

“It’s
easy.  We just stand above the areas that are protected by the nets. 
They’ll run right into them.”

Somewhere in the
middle of Rawl’s final sentence, from somewhere off in the dense brush to their
right, there came a snap and a whizzing whine so that his sentence was
punctuated by the
thunk
as the bolt hit a tree a foot from his
head.  Rawl yelped in surprise and dove for the ground.  The others
did the same.  They crawled on their bellies to the right side of the path
to shelter behind the trunks there.  More bolts sliced through the
branches above their heads. 

Lying
on their stomachs, Paul and Josie pump-loaded their
bows.  Tipper stood up against a tree to load his bow.  He set the
butt on the ground and pushed the string into the lock above the trigger. 
As he straightened up, he yelled in pain and fell beside Rawl, tumbling back
into the path.  Rawl grabbed Tipper’s shoulders and dragged him back into
cover.  As he did, he saw a bolt had pierced Tipper’s leg.  Rawl
closed his eyes as he pulled Tipper the rest of the way to safety.  He
felt like his breakfast was trying to crawl its way back up his throat. 
The bolt had struck the muscle of Tipper’s thigh and the square head had come clear
through. 

“Pull it out,”
Tipper said between his teeth.  “Get it out.”

Paul helped prop
Tipper on his side.  Rawl, quite sure he was going to be sick, placed his
hands against the wet warm patch on Tipper’s pants.  The head was the
broadest part of the bolt and the bolt had no fletching, so they all knew they
had to pull it out in the same direction it had been traveling when it
entered.  Mirela wrapped one hand around the head of the bolt and pressed
the other around the exit wound. 

“Josie, cover
us,” Rawl said, nodding to her to watch the woods. 

“Paul,” Mirela
said.  “Give him something to bite.”

Paul fished
around in the litter and brought up a bit of a branch.  He helped Tipper
set it between his teeth.  Paul nodded to Mirela.  She pulled the
bolt in one quick jerk.  Tipper screamed into his gag. 

“Your knife,
Rawl,” Mirela said.  With Rawl’s knife, she cut away Tipper’s pant
leg.  She tore the material into strips and wrapped them about the wound.

“We’ve got to
get him back,” Mirela said.

Rawl rose to a
crouch and was greeted by a bolt that barely missed his ear.  But this
time, not thirty paces away, he caught sight of their faces. 
White, wide-eyed, human faces.
 

Lying on his
back, with his legs bent over him and his seat pressed to the trunk of a tree,
Rawl set the butt of his crossbow against the trunk and bent and loaded
it.  He handed the bow to Josie and motioned for her to give him hers,
which had originally been his.  He handed Tipper’s bow back to him. 
Rawl worked his way to the side of their little huddle till he was closest to
the beach.  “Stay here,” he told them.  “If you get a chance, get
Tipper out of here.”

“Where are you
going?” Josie asked. 

“I’m going to
try to get around them,” Rawl said. 

He chose to move
towards the beach because he imagined their ambushers would expect them to try
to retreat for the fort.  Crawling on his belly, he scooted a ways down
the path, then turned and began working his way into the woods.  He heard
Paul shout, and, looking back, saw his brother spring up into a crouch, fire a
bolt, and drop back down.  Rawl continued moving.  He knew his
brother was trying to hold their attention.  

Crawling through
the underbrush, he couldn’t see more than a few feet in any direction. 
His greatest fear was that one of his enemies would appear suddenly above him
and shoot him in the back before he got a chance to raise his bow.  He
closed his eyes several times and tried to picture a bird’s-eye view of his
original position, the point at which he had seen his
enemies,
and the half-loop he was traveling.  When he was as sure as he could be
that he’d gone far enough, he rose to a compressed crouch behind the trunk of a
large spruce.  For all he knew, the ambushers were right on the other side
of the trunk.  They could also be twenty feet to either side of it. 
To make a misstep would be fatal.  He couldn’t risk moving until he had a
better idea.  The moments ticked by.  He wondered if Tipper was still
losing blood.  Finally, his brother shouted and fired again.  In the
quiet that followed, he heard voices talking lowly just on the other side of
the tree. 

“It’s no use now
that they know we’re here,” Crane’s voice said.

“And if you were
all better shots, we’d already be done,” Rundal’s voice said. 

Rawl felt a
strange chill when he heard Rundal’s voice.  He recognized it easily
enough, but there was something in it he had not heard before.

“We’ll just have
to wait for another chance,” Crane said.

“You want to try
explaining that to them, it’s your funeral,” Rundal said.  “This is the
only chance we’re going to get.  We’ll have to flank them.”

Rawl knew he had
to act in that moment or his brother and the others might be killed. 
Checking for the dozenth time that his bow was loaded and saying a silent
prayer that the magazine wouldn’t jam, he whirled around the tree. 

Looking back on
it, he was always a little ashamed he hadn’t been able to do it silently. 
But, in the moment, his adrenaline got the best of him and for the next few
seconds he was making one prolonged war cry-scream. 

Smith Darinson
was crouching with his back to the opposite side of the tree so that Rawl
almost tripped over him as he came around it.  Rawl’s first bolt hit Smith
between the shoulder blades.  The man slumped forward and died with a
sigh.  Vick Crane jumped up, screaming just like Rawl, although Rawl
hardly noticed Crane’s screaming or his own in the thick of things.  Crane
swung his bow towards Rawl but Rawl fired first, then again.  His bolts
hit Crane in the shoulder and the thigh and the older man dropped with a
shriek.  Even as Crane was jumping, swinging, screaming, and falling,
Gundar Holt jumped to his feet and took off in the opposite direction through
the trees.  Rawl fired after him but missed.  “That’s what I
thought,” Rawl shouted after him. 

Rawl’s taunt was
still on his lips when something swung out from behind the tree in front of
him, smashed his bow from his hands, then caught him in the face and threw him
on his back.  Rundal Tillman was suddenly on top of him, his spear shaft,
which Rundal had used like a club to disarm Rawl and knock him down, pressed
against Rawl’s throat.  The ash shaft was slowly crushing Rawl’s windpipe,
but Rundal, who’d pinned Rawl’s arms just below the shoulder with his knees,
did not seem content to wait for this.  Keeping the shaft in place with
one hand, he used the other to draw his knife. 

“You shouldn’t
have gotten in our way, boy,” Rundal said.  “The foreign witch is the only
one they wanted us to kill.”

Rawl had never
liked Rundal, had never quite thought him fully human, but there was something
new in his voice, and in his eyes, which made Rawl long for the old
Rundal.  Or perhaps it was not the presence of something new but the
absence of something that had once been there far below the surface but had now
been completely smothered out. 

“You could have
joined us.  We could have had some fun with her first.  You might
have found you liked our idea of fun.”

Black spots were
exploding in Rawl’s vision.  Rundal raised his knife. 

“Who knows, we
might have even taken your little sweetheart along for the ride.”

“You boys talking about me?”

For the rest of
her life, Josie would remember the look on Rundal’s face when he spun to find
her standing behind him with her crossbow trained on his chest.  As he
turned, Rundal shifted his knife in his hand and arched his arm for the
throw.  Even so, he was too slow.  Josie’s finger twitched on the
trigger.  Her bolt buried half its length in Rundal’s chest and slammed
him to the ground.

Rawl rolled out
from under Rundal’s still-twitching body.  He lay with one arm under his
chest while his free hand massaged his throat.  He coughed and sobbed for
air and both actions felt like knives being rammed down his windpipe. 
Josie knelt beside him.  “Are you alright?”