“For this?” he snorted. “Such a pinch is not sufficient to keep a man off the wall!”
“That will be necessary for tomorrow at least,” the other told him calmly. “You are to remain with the rearmost reserves, assuming Pyra will permit you to rise at all.”
“If you imagine I will allow my comrades to go up there alone—” he began hotly.
“My mind is set, Sergeant. That wound will interfere with your movements until it settles a bit. If you were stricken again because of it or if it reopened, I should lose you for the duration or, perhaps, permanently. I need you too badly to permit that.”
The Ravenfielder's face was starting to look pinched, and he gently touched his bandaged shoulder. “I keep you talking too long. Sleep now, or I shall violate my own command and force an opiate on you. Then I should have to order yet another warrior out of combat to guard you until you woke out of its hold and were capable of your own defense once more.”
The other glared at him. He grinned in the end and settled back. “I must yield. You would do it.”
“Believe that I would, Comrade.”
The mercenary leader rose and moved toward the door. He remained there until he saw the Sergeant's breathing become relaxed and steady, then slipped from the room and quietly pulled the door shut beside him.
All the energy seemed to go out of the Mountain Hawk once he found himself alone and, for the moment, free of the need to maintain the appearance of undiminished strength.
There were papers on his makeshift desk that needed his attention, but he did not so much as look at them when he took his seat more out of habit than through any conscious willing.
It was the army he commanded that filled his mind until the thinking tore the heart out of him. They were valiant and skilled those warriors out there, uncomplaining under the harsh task fate had set them. It was his to do as well by them.
He could not but fail them in that. There was no way he could give them victory, and he would not be able to give the most of them life, not even that of a heavily hunted partisan. He now believed that it would be only a very small minority who would be able to make their escape in accordance with his plan when the barrier was at last breached.
He shook his head. He was tired, too tired, or he would not be wallowing in himself like this. Despair had to be fought, not nurtured …
He straightened at the sound of a knock, but the blankness betraying his almost totally spent spirit could not be forced so quickly from his eyes, although he made no delay in rising and returning Pyra's greeting when she came into the cottage. He did not bother to set his helmet over his head and face.
The healer read that which gripped him aright but chose not to remark directly upon it. “I could have expected to find you looking worse, I suppose,” she declared gruffly after a few seconds of close scrutiny.
The Captain could not but smile for all his weariness and depression. “And also a great deal better, I warrant.”
“That, too—The Sergeant is asleep?”
“He is now.”
“The privileges of low rank!” she muttered somewhat enviously.
Tarlach glanced at his desk and the work waiting upon it and sighed. “Torkis would not be lying there if that hole were not in his back, I think, but, yes, authority does carry some measure of disadvantage to balance its privileges.”
He eyed her curiously. He was not surprised to find the Falconer woman here. Given his own fall and the fact that he had assumed responsibility for the significantly injured Ravenfielder, he had actually expected to see her before now.
Another had not yet come, and a chill gripped his heart. “The Holdruler was not wounded?” he asked in a voice held steady by force of will.
“The Lady Una was fortunate today and took no injury. There is just more to be done with your second Lieutenant out of the line.”
“Truly, and I am neglecting my share of it by talking here.” Tarlach slowly came to his feet and moved toward the door. “I had best see how the others are faring now. The paperwork will wait so long.”
He should have attended to that immediately upon the close of the day's hostilities, but Torkis's need plus the healer's insistence that he rest a while himself before attempting to rise had delayed him.
Pyra lifted a hand to stay him. “The Holdlady is quite capable of handling that tonight, and I imagine I am not so ignorant of a commander's duties after heading a women's village that I cannot give you a bit of help here. I may not know much about arranging the manning of a defensive wall, but rest assured that I am well familiar with a supply roster. It seems to me that I have been shirking this part of it all until now.”
“No one can accuse you of that, healer, but I confess I welcome the aid. I am uncommonly weary tonight.”
“Little wonder! By all rights, you should be ordered to bed yourself.”
“We could all use about a week of that,” Tarlach responded ruefully.
Pyra went to the desk. “Show me what is to be done, Bird Warrior.”
The Falconer woman proved as efficient at detail work as she was in the healing arts, and they were able to quit the desk again in a surprisingly short time.
“You have my thanks,” the Captain told her. “I had not thought to see the end of this for some while yet.”
“If nothing else remains, we can consider ourselves free to get a bite to eat before the meal wagon goes back up.”
She saw him shrug and shook her head. “You fasted last night. There must be no more of that, Mountain Hawk.”
“Did the Lady Una tell you that?” he demanded irritably. He knew that the two women were friends, and females talked even as men did.
“No, though by rights she should have done so since I bear the responsibility for keeping us all on our feet. Your head Lieutenant mentioned it.”
Brennan?
The healer saw his surprise and smiled. “Your comrades are concerned about you. More than one of them fears that you will drive yourself down.”
She stood up. “It may be a task to take food, but you will weaken all too quickly without it. I shall bring you something if you do not feel up to going for it yourself.”
Tarlach stiffened. “There is no place for such service here, nor could I accept the like from you.”
“Come with me, then. It shall be one way or the other.”
The night was a pleasant one, cold but without real bitterness and quieter than either had known in many long weeks. The peace of it tore their war-wracked spirits, pierced them, waked such intense longing that neither healer nor warrior could bear to close himself within walls away from it, whatever the desire for sleep. They ate slowly and then returned to the cottage that had become both the Captain's office and his quarters.
There was a low wooden bench by the door, and Tarlach seated himself upon it, resting his back against the whitewashed wall. His eyes closed. The slightly damp coolness of the stone felt good to him, as if he were fevered.
Pyra hesitated, then seated herself beside him. Like the Mountain Hawk she said nothing but only sat back, drinking in the quiet of the night.
Storm Challenger settled on the man's arm, crooning for attention until he began to stroke the soft feathers.
Tarlach glanced at his companion. “That you are a competent healer and work as such is a given, but there is no gratitude strong enough for the care you have shown for our winged ones.”
“None is required,” she said softly, “no more than for that which I give to yourselves.” Her voice tightened. “By the Amber Lady, how I hate to see their fragile bodies torn! War is human work, not theirs. They involve themselves in it for love of us.”
Their human comrades loved them deeply in return. That much, at least, she had learned in these last terrible weeks. Only today, she had seen a Falconer draw apart and, thinking himself unobserved, weep like a child for the war bird whose life all her skill had not been able to save. Her heart had ached for him and ached because she could do
nothing more for him than quietly withdraw and leave him to his grief.
With the falcons, it was different. She found that she could comfort them, the females particularly, but also the males, at least temporarily. Much of whatever time she had, she devoted to them, and even when she slept, it was usually cradling one or more of the birds who had been wounded in body or heart.
So much sacrifice, she thought, yet neither she nor the officer beside her could deny that it was needful. Seakeep, all High Hallack and all the world beyond, depended upon their strength now.
Her eyes closed momentarily. Seakeepdale was made for peace, for joy and life and the labor needed to secure both… .
“This is a good land,” she ventured at last after several minutes’ silence. “It is beautiful in itself, and its people are as fine as I could imagine or wish.”
Ice filled her soul. Soon death could sweep the most of them and slavery crush the rest.
“We must win this war, Mountain Hawk,” she said steadily, with deadly purpose.
The same thought, the same fear, had touched the man's mind as well. “We shall win it. Here or elsewhere, we shall conquer. What Alizon could not take, these accursed outsiders shall not have, either.”
Partly to conceal the emotion on him, partly to dissipate it, the mercenary straightened out of his relaxed position and started to rise.
He slumped back again with a gasp of pain as his battered muscles violently protested the sudden movement.
Pyra started in alarm, then recognized the cause of his trouble. “Have you stiffened so much already?” she asked with no small concern.
Tarlach found his voice. “I shall have to work this out before I mount the wall tomorrow,” he said through set lips.
“If you do not, you will not be in the line. You cannot fight when you are unable even to get to your feet.”
She did not attempt to assist him. Such help, he might accept from one of his comrades or perhaps from the Lady Una if they were alone like this, but she knew he would not take it willingly from her.
The Captain steeled himself. His face remained strained, and he had to lean upon the wall to rise, but he knew his body would not betray him like this again. He would not permit it to do so.
“I shall be ready. Do not fear for that.”
21
The Mountain Hawk was about to leave his chamber the following morning when Brennan entered it.
He read the manner in which the Lieutenant watched his movements and frowned. “Did Pyra not believe me?”
“She knows better than to trust any Falconer in such a matter, my friend. We have a tendency to carry endurance too far. How do you feel?”
“Well enough to avenge my aches upon our enemies.”
Tarlach noticed a faint red line on the otherwise fair skin of his comrade's neck. It ran from a point just beneath the ear to his high collar, as if a sword tip or spear point—he believed it was the former—had just broken the skin there. “You did not escape entirely unscathed yourself, I see. That was a little close.”
“I should have found it most inconvenient had it come any nearer,” he admitted.
A flash of white caught Tarlach's attention. The other's left hand was completely encased in a thick bandage. This was not the way in which their healers were binding minor injuries, and the lightness at once vanished from his tone and expression.
“What happened to you?”
“Grabbed a sword,” Brennan replied laconically. “It is nothing permanent. My left arm shall just be confined to shield work for a while, that is all.”
“This is why Una took the work for me last night instead of you?”
He shrugged. “There were graver wounds than mine. It was late by the time the healer's aides could look to me, and I believe they did not finish any too quickly once they did start work.”
“You believe? They sent you to sleep?” Only in the case of delicate, immediately essential surgery or with wounds of such gravity as to demand evacuation were opiates administered. That spoke ill for the nature of the damage the hand had sustained.
“Pyra assured me there will be no loss of function.” He grinned. “Come, friend, or you shall begin to embarrass me! Let us prepare to give our guests their morning greeting.”
Dawn was an exceptionally lovely one and gave promise of an extraordinarily beautiful day to follow.
A fair setting to contrast with harsh deeds, Tarlach thought bitterly, for the scene unfolding before him in the ever-strengthening light was that which had met his eyes for what now seemed like the better part of eternity to his weary mind.
No, there was a difference in the great host massed upon the beach, a new incredulity.
The Sultanites had struck with everything they had possessed the previous day. They had accepted that the wall still stood when they had retired at last with the coming of night, but they had not expected to find it defended like this when morning again broke, its garrison calm, staunch, quietly, perilously defiant, as it had been from the beginning of its ordeal. Reason still declared that victory must be theirs, but now, looking upon those steady, awesomely deadly warriors, they doubted. For the first time, they doubted.
That was of no consequence. They, too, steeled themselves, and their general brought his trumpet to his lips.
He did not wind it.
Another call broke upon the brisk morning air, high and strong and clear, as could only have sounded from a Falconer battle horn.
Black-uniformed riders appeared suddenly upon the high trail leading into the valley, their number beyond ready counting although they were but the vanguard of the great Falconer host.
They paused for what seemed an eternal moment and then, as a second command was given, this time the order to charge, they tore down the steep way toward the barrier and their goal beyond it.
Wave after wave of warriors followed, an army that seemed in this moment vast almost beyond possibility to both the frozen invaders and their equally stunned opponents.
Above them flew the falcons, thousands of them, in a great, solid wing that blackened all that part of the sky.
Tarlach's eyes narrowed momentarily. The human force was not nearly so great. …
His head raised in a fierce pride. The females! All of them, even those from the columns where none would follow a warrior, had joined with the army in their world's defense.
He watched them come, riders and war birds. This was his race as none had seen them since they had come north in the distant past, full in strength and pride and with a cause worthy of their skill and courage before them.
They were not the lesser party. For the first time, the true ravages of storm and sword came home to him, and he realized with both shock and an instinctive horror that human would match equally with human. With the intervention of the falcons, Seakeep's army was the greater by a vast margin.
The Sultanites, too, were aware of the blow fate had struck them. Their position was suddenly a very different and terrible one. They were soldiers to the core and hastily reformed themselves into the square that would best permit them to meet the foes so rapidly pouring down upon them, but they knew their efforts to be hopeless. Each looked upon the Falconer host and realized that the time of his doom was come.
Tarlach ordered every third of his warriors to stand aside to give the newcomers, who abandoned their horses before reaching the foot of the barrier, free access to the beach below but refused to permit them to follow after. Even now, with their salvation come, he would not allow the wall's defense to be weakened, not while any force at all remained to their enemies to threaten it.
His face and stance were impassive. He moved closer to Una, who held the place beside him, but he neither touched nor spoke to her.
The Mountain Hawk did not really watch what followed after the two armies joined in earnest and wished he might leave the wall altogether. This was slaughter on a scale he had not witnessed before, not even in the charge that had completed the breaking of Al
izon's power, and he hoped he would never have to see a repetition of it again. With all his heart, he prayed he would never be party to the like.
The Sultanite warriors were both courageous and skilled. They sold their lives dearly, but this was a fight without hope. Their heavy losses at the wall and their losses to the ocean before their assault had even begun, the hardships under which they had lived and fought since that time, insured that they could not conquer. Spent as they were and lacking as they did any defense save that provided by their own bodies and shields, it could not be otherwise.
Despite that and the fact that the Falconers were fresh, their long ride not withstanding, the invaders might have held them long before going down had it not been for the war birds. Diving and fighting as an independent body, they were a force of irresistible power and terror, the more effective still against these aliens, who had from the beginning responded to them with the well-nigh superstitious horror of those who had never paired thus in war or friendship with beings of any other species.
There was no question of quarter, none of surrender. This, the Sultanites would not accept, would not consider accepting. The magnitude of their failure and its consequences for all their race made the continuation of life inconceivable in their minds, even had they not borne the disgrace of having been kept from what should have been a quick and sure victory by so pitifully few opponents. If the Falconers’ swords spared any of them, they would fall upon their own.
The mercenaries soon came to recognize that fact and to accept it as inevitable although butchery was not their way, and they had both the respect for their enemies and the compassion to grant them the faster and more honorable release they sought.
Una of Seakeep lowered her head and averted her face from the slaughter below, but despite her hatred of that and the deep weariness of her body and spirit, she was filled with a sense of wonder. It was over, and they had conquered. They had conquered the impossible, and they lived, the most of them.
The weeks just past seemed unreal to her now, as if they had been a strange, Witch-inspired nightmare.