The torches reflected the gleam of hundreds of pairs of dark eyes, watching her.
“Less than one hundred Great Years ago the first mortals came into our lands, savage, dangerous creatures in numbers ever swelling. But when we would have scoured them from our soil, our cousins the Zida’ya prevented us, saying, ‘They are but few, and the land is big enough for all.’ You know the tragedy that came from their foolish forbearance. You know how mortals killed Drukhi, the son of our great queen. And that was only the first of the outrages they have visited upon us. They were the wedge that split the two kindreds of the Keida’ya, and although, for a time, we both lived in uneasy peace with the newcomers, it did not last.
“During the lifetimes of most of you here, the first of the bearded ones came over the sea with weapons of black iron and hearts full of hate. Like locusts they devoured all that they touched, destroying even their own kind in their bloodlust and fury. Then the Zida’ya learned to their sorrow the folly of their patience with these short-lived, swift-breeding animals. The last of our people’s great cities fell when Ineluki of the Zida’ya was destroyed trying to defend Asu’a against the invaders. Only mortal kings, their hands red with blood—our people’s blood—have sat on Asu’a’s throne ever since.”
Here the general suddenly stopped and fell silent, as if some new thought had occurred to her. The assembled Sacrifices, their myriad gazes following her as one, stared raptly at the slender, bright shape in silver-white armor. “Did I say the last city of our people?” Suno’ku asked. “That is not true. One great city remains—one refuge of the People of the Garden. And that city is Nakkiga, our home.
“Beyond this tower, just outside the boundary walls of our land, waits an army of mortals. And not just any mortals, but the very same bearded Northerners who destroyed Ineluki and Asu’a, who laid waste to Hikehikayo and drove out the last of our people there, who left a trail of our blood across all the lands that once belonged to us. Now they mean to bring down these walls, too. They will swarm in their thousands all the way to Nakkiga itself, now all but undefended after our defeat in the southern lands.”
The Sacrifices were stirring, still following Suno’ku’s every word and gesture. It felt to Viyeki as though he stood in the middle of a hornets’ nest and someone had begun to shake it.
“Will we hold the wall?” she asked. “The answer is, we must, if only for a short while. But we cannot hold it for long. The shaking earth of a few seasons back has weakened it, and if every single one of us laid down our lives here, still we would hold back the mortals for only a short time. In a few days or weeks, a changing of the moon’s face at most, our defense would fail before their numbers and they would sweep past us to great Nakkiga itself. And what would they do there?” Suno’ku’s voice became quieter but no less forceful. “When they took Asu’a the first time, a horror that is within the memory of most here today, the mortals killed every living thing within its walls. Nor were those deaths swift and merciful. Do you think they will do any different if they take Nakkiga?”
Now the Sacrifices were openly murmuring, some clenching and unclenching their fists. Viyeki was astounded—the discipline of the fighting order was legendary, and General Suno’ku had broken it in moments. For the first time in his life, Viyeki wondered if his people’s eagerness to be ruled by a greater power than themselves might in truth be a sort of weakness, in the same way that over-hardened witchwood lacked flexibility and thus was more easily broken.
“Make no mistake,” Suno’ku continued, her noble face as grim as her words. “The mortals will rage through our city like a giant in the Field of Stone Flowers, smashing everything. They will destroy every monument to the Lost Garden, every precious memorial to our sacred martyrs. But what they do to the living will be worse. Your families and clans will fall before them like sheep caught by a pack of raving wolves. Your daughters and wives will be raped and then murdered. No one will be spared. When they have finished, Nakkiga will be a fit place only for bats, beetles, and helpless ghosts.” She spoke slowly, each word a painful spite. “They will pull the queen herself from the keta-yi’indra, where she lies helpless after the last battle in the south, and they will take her and burn her. The mother of us all will die in agony, and the last living memory of the Garden will disappear from the earth. Because we cannot hold this wall. We are not strong enough. The fortifications are not strong enough. And there is no help coming from Nakkiga. We are alone.” And slowly, deliberately, Suno’ku turned her back on the warriors and hung her head as if in final defeat.
The murmuring died away, but for a few noises that might have been strangled sobs. Then, out of the silence, a single voice spoke. It was Hayyano, and the rage and pain in his words made even Viyeki, who thought little of the commander, ache inside. “Is there nothing we can do, then?” Hayyano demanded. “Nothing at all? Why do you tell us this, General? Why do you set our hearts afire and then leave them to burn?”
A moment—a long moment—and then Suno’ku made the gesture for attention. It was only for effect, Viyeki knew: all eyes were already on her. “Yes, there is one chance. One unlikely chance.”
“Tell us!” cried Hayyano, and although no one echoed him, it was clear from the shuffling and hand-signs of agreement that he spoke for all the Sacrifices gathered. Viyeki could feel their desperate fury—a rage that now made the very air tremble as if a storm was imminent.
“We cannot in any case hold this wall or this tower for long,” she said. “But if enough of us can make it back to Nakkiga, especially the Builders here, it is possible we can shore up the mountain’s defenses sufficiently to keep the mortals from victory. The great gates of Nakkiga have never been breached by mortal or immortal—even the queen herself could not take it by force when she first came there, but had to be welcomed in by its citizens. The gates of Nakkiga are strong and we can make them stronger still. But we need time. Can you do that?”
“For our queen, for the Garden, we can do anything!” Hayyano shouted, and at last a chorus of agreement broke from the ranks. “Tell us, General! Tell us what we must do!”
She stared at the eager throng for a moment as if considering. Moved despite his moments of doubt, Viyeki found himself leaning forward, half-hoping she would ask him to join the warriors in sacrificing themselves to save their queen and city. “High Magister Yaarike,” the general said at last. “Will you choose a dozen of your engineers to remain behind and help with the defense? They will not return to Nakkiga, but they will be promised a place of glory in the tales of this time—and I promise this time will be remembered as long as the Garden itself is remembered.”
Yaarike wore his most solemn face. “I will ask for volunteers, General Suno’ku, but one way or another, you will have your dozen.”
“Thank you, High Magister.” Suno’ku looked to the assembled Sacrifices, who had grown almost downcast when she turned away, but who were now all attention once more. “And what of you, my warriors? Which of you will offer your lives here and now for the chance that Nakkiga may live? I need a hundred volunteers to stay, and each must give me his or her sworn vow to send at least ten mortals into the darkness before the end comes. How many will do this? Which of your names will be told and retold until the sun itself is consumed by the black emptiness at the end of time and the great song finally ends? Show me your swords!”
More than two hundred blades leaped from their scabbards as one, a chiming scrape of witchwood and bronze so harsh and loud that Viyeki nearly put his fingers in his ears. Every Sacrifice had lifted his sword.
“I expected no less,” Suno’ku said, nodding. “The queen, were she here, would smile to see her brave children.” She turned to Hayyano. “League Commander, you will take charge of the garrison. Choose one hundred Sacrifices, favoring those who are older or without families. And do not insult those now standing guard upon the walls by excluding them from the chance to fight this glorious fight.”
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“I hear you, General,” said Hayyano, his narrow face flushed at cheekbones and temples as if he had run a long distance through the cold. “We will hold this wall to our last beating heart. We will make you proud.”
“You already have,” she said. “Your death-songs were sung long ago. The Celebrants have already written down all your names. Now you can give those deaths in perfect glory, for our queen and our race. And I promise you in return that those of us who must go to defend Nakkiga will give every last breath we have to honor your sacrifice and save our people. For the Garden!”
“For the Garden!” echoed hundreds of voices, including Viyeki’s own. He was surprised to discover that his eyes were brimming. He did not even know when the tears had begun.
Frost made the roof sag, and the wind kept the sides of the big tent rippling. The cold seemed to creep in and bite Isgrimnur with sharp little teeth that pierced even his clothing. The duke thought he had never, not even through the worst of the fighting at the Hayholt or even in the foul, brackish Wran, longed so deeply for a chair before a warm fire in a warm room in a stern, safe castle.
Elysia, Mother of Mercy, I am weary of cold, he thought, then dragged his attention back to the matter at hand.
“So what you are saying, man, is that we are winning,” growled Brindur. “That in a matter of a day or two we will have the wall down and our hands on the throats of those corpse-skinned creatures.” But as he talked, Brindur did not even look up from the sharpening of his sword. Since his son’s terrible death it seemed the only thing he did. Isgrimnur knew that look of disinterest and feared it, for he had seen it on other men and they had never lived long. “Already looking to the next world,” his father had said of another battle-mad warrior. What they had lost here in the Norn lands already was bad enough. Brindur was a man Isgrimnur relied on, had always been one of the most dependable of his thanes: but he did not know this Brindur at all.
“No, that is not what I’m saying!” Sludig’s voice was tight-strung with anger, but after receiving a pointed look from the duke, he took a breath and tried again, this time speaking directly to Isgrimnur as though Brindur and the others were not inside the tent with them. “What I am trying to say, my lord, is that we should not be winning this way. Yes, the Bear has all but knocked down the wall. Yes, the Norn archers in the tower have killed or wounded only a few of the men wielding the ram. But there were several hundred Norn fighters in the group that escaped from us at the ruins. Why do they not fight back as we knock down their wall? Such mildness does not signify. Nothing lies beyond these walls but their stronghold in Stormspike itself!”
“Nothing that we know about,” said Isgrimnur. “But our ignorance is as big as my belly. Is he right, Ayaminu? Is there nothing else between us and the Norn mountains? And is my man right to suspect that something else is going on that we do not see?”
“It depends first on what you mean by ‘nothing,’” she said. “The lands between the wall and the mountain you call Stormspike are no longer inhabited, and most of the city that was built there long ago is in ruins now. But that does not warrant they will not be waiting in ambush, or that forces from Nakkiga itself will not meet you before you reach the gates.”
“We will have more talk about these gates later,” said Isgrimnur. “But now we must consider what is immediately in front of us. Sludig, could it be that the Norns simply have no arrows left, no weapons they can hurt us with until we close with them in actual combat?”
“I await that hour,” said Brindur, still sharpening. “I wait for nothing else.”
“You will have a sword that is little more than a dagger if you keep scraping away at it like that,” the duke told him. “But that isn’t my chief concern. Is there anything else that makes you worry, Sludig?”
The younger man shook his head, his forehead and brows drawn together in frustration. “Only feelings, my lord—the smell of the thing. We have fought them many times now and the Norns are nothing if not subtle. They brought many strange weapons against us at Naglimund, both during the siege and later, and just as many tricks in the last battle at the Hayholt. Poison powders. False gates. The dead made to walk. Giants summoned like tame hounds, crushing and rending everything they could reach. But where are these things now? Since their escape from the ruined fort they have managed only noises and shadows, which the men have grown used to, which no longer strike fear in any heart. As for actual fighting, we have seen only a few stones and a few arrows from the tower’s three beaks and that weak spot on the wall, aimed at the siege engines and the ram. A few of our men have been downed—by chance as much as anything else.” Sludig’s frown deepened. “And so I must ask myself—are they truly so weak?”
One of Brindur’s Skoggeymen, an older warrior with gray-shot whiskers, spoke up. “The fairies are few now, Duke Isgrimnur, whatever Sludig may think. They have lost the war and we carry it to their own land, as we should. Soon we will destroy them all so they cannot trouble us again. Why make a mystery out of weakness?”
Sludig scowled. “Because when you suppose that an enemy is weak, Marri Ironbeard, you only realize you were wrong when they’ve killed you.”
“Perhaps you have lost your taste for this kind of fighting,” Brindur said, briefly raising his eyes to give Sludig a hard look. “Or perhaps your friendship with trolls and fairies—yes, I have heard about you, Sludig Two-Axes—has made you reluctant to pursue them. Or even afraid.”
Sludig’s hand dropped to one of the bearded hand-axes in his broad belt. His eyes narrowed. “My lord, did you not grieve the loss of your son, as we all do, I would demand you to prove that charge with your own hand, man to man.”
“Enough!” shouted Isgrimnur. “No accusations. Brindur, you insult Sludig for no reason. His loyalty is beyond doubt. I too have conversed with, and even fought beside, trolls and fairies. If you question his loyalty, you question mine!”
Brindur shrugged. “I take nothing back, but I did not say he was guilty of treason, merely asked him if he had the heart for this fight.”
“This is only what our enemies would wish, to have us arguing and biting each other’s backs. Enough!” Isgrimnur was furious. “I asked Sludig a question, Brindur, and he answered me—before you needlessly insulted him. I ask you the same question. Do you believe that the Norns are as weak now as they appear?”
Brindur tested the edge of his blade with his finger, then sucked the blood from his fingertip and spat onto the packed, icy ground in a place the rugs didn’t cover. Outside the wind had risen again, rattling the duke’s tent so that the cloth hummed like the wings of a monstrous insect. “Yes, the White Foxes are fierce fighters. Hard to kill. I do not make the mistake of thinking otherwise. They surprised us with reinforcements at the ruined fort, but we have seen no signs of any more coming. We killed enough of them there that I doubt more than ten score or so of those reinforcements survive, and they had scarce enough fighters in the first group. So I think they are spent and have but little strength left. Our own men are hungry enough in this blighted, frozen place, and we have brought food for ourselves out of Rimmersgard. The Norns were already hungry weeks ago, and whatever tricks they have, I doubt they can feed themselves on air or they would not have attacked so many villages for grain and other supplies. So my wits tell me Two-Axes is only jumping at the same shadows and strange noises that he himself talked about.”
Another petty, pointless sting. Before Isgrimnur could shape a reply, a figure, half-obscured by a crust of snowflakes, pushed in past the quivering fabric of the tent door.
“I crave pardon, Your Grace, my lords,” the soldier said. “I bring a message from Jarl Vigri. He says there are pieces falling from the wall after the last blow of the great Bear. He thinks it is about to come down.”
Brindur’s dour mood dropped away in an instant. “Ha! By God,” the thane said, climbing to his feet, “If the wall is coming down, I will
not be the last to paint my blade with fairy blood!” He turned to one of the younger Skoggeymen. “Fani, you fool, where is my helmet?”
Isgrimnur still had things he needed to discuss with Brindur and the rest, including the letter that a messenger had brought him only this morning, but he would never keep their attention now. As he watched the thane and his Skoggeymen scrambling for their weapons, he thought briefly of trying to make their rush toward the wall more orderly, then decided it would be better to bow to the inevitable. Even if the wall was badly damaged it might not fall for many more swings of the battering ram, and even the most anxious Rimmersgard warrior could not come to grips with the enemy until that moment. In the meantime, letting Brindur and the rest vent their impatience on an immense weight of black stone might just be a good idea. His other news could wait.
Two of Isgrimnur’s house carls were standing outside the tent, one with his battle-helmet and his White Bear and Stars standard, the other holding the duke’s large and patient horse. Isgrimnur heaved himself into the saddle, not without help, then spurred upward after the others.
The battering ram, close against the wall but well to one side of the three-beaked tower, was just about to make another stroke as Brindur and the rest reached it. Like Vigri’s soldiers who were already crouched on either side of the massive device, they held their shields above their heads to ward off arrows from the tower or wall, waiting for their chance to attack.
The ram’s sloping roof, which protected the men beneath it from defenders’ arrows, was the length of a tithing barn, though much narrower, and so large that it had to be assembled in sections like the bear-headed ram itself. Snow had been piled high atop the ram’s roof as a protection against flaming arrows, but Isgrimnur saw no sign of Norns now and little evidence of defense or defenders at all.
The ram’s overseers chanted loudly and beat their drums, competing with the war-cries of Brindur and his party. The sweating, grunting ram-handlers drew the great log back as far as its heavy chains would allow; then, at the chief overseer’s command, let it go. The Big Bear’s grinning iron muzzle swung forward and smashed into the already weakened wall with a loud crunch. The wall still did not collapse, but it shifted and bowed inward where the ram had struck, causing a shower of stone chips when cracks between the unmortared stones widened.