Warhost of Vastmark
‘They’re well beaten,’ Caolle murmured. Another scout poised at his elbow, pale with raw nerves, his appeal sent by fellows who begged for permission to ease off the force of the attack.
If Arithon was aware of the plea, he said nothing. Nor did he turn from the seething scene below as, made miniature by height and distance, oarsmen bent their bronzed backs and grappled their laden craft in toothpick strokes across waters lapped blue-green in shade. Bowfire harried their progress. The relentless rain of shafts clattered over rib and seat and gunwale to bite off white splinters from the wood. Live men used bristled corpses as cover, or cowered behind living shieldmates, moaning prayers to a deaf deity.
The crack of sails being set and sheeted home rebounded from the imprisoning cliffs, then spiralled on the breeze to the heights. Every vessel in the anchorage turned her helm down to flee, but for the one plucky fishing sloop from Merior. Manned by a captain too dour to stand down, that one wore ship in a neat turn of seamanship and tucked up underneath the ledges. Shielded by rock, she launched off her dories, while her stubborn master bellowed orders to evacuate the wounded from the shingle.
His bearing like a puppet chiselled out of ivory, Arithon plucked the second signal arrow from the earth, set nock to string and prepared to fire again.
Chilled in his liege’s shadow as he bent the black bow, Caolle urged the shaken scout, ‘Go back. Now, I say! The wrong word will doubtless raise the royal temper. Let me speak in behalf of your men.’
Horn and lacquer snapped in recoil. The arrow hissed out. A flight of yellow ribbons unreeled across the sky of the Havens.
In the caves lower down, bound to obedience, the archers tipped the lids off ceramic pots of coals. They changed from broadheads to shafts tipped in tallow-soaked lint, then touched them aflame one by one. Their next shots were fired in high arcs across the water, their targets the billows of unbrailed canvas. The air rippled, first singed into distortion by brown smoke and fat-fed flame, then cut by hissing arcs and the heartrending, treble shouts of panic. The ships nearest to the shoreline sprang into fire like toys. Men jumped clear of burning rigging. They escaped the scything crash of fallen yard-arms into water, to thrash in frantic circles until they drowned. Or they swam back onto the blood-slippery beaches, into the directionless melee that drove the trapped garrisons hither and yon, while the arrows fell and fell and served lethal end to their struggles.
The more fortunate ships on the outer line ran up headsails, and let their bows fall off toward the free waters of Rockbay inlet. Tiny figures scrambled up ratlines, packed the footropes on the yardarms to unbrail more sails to draw against the gusting onshore breeze.
The lead vessel scarcely caught her wind when the Khetienn rounded the headland, tanbark sails like old wounds against the clean shear of the water, and her gear in fearful trim. An order cracked out. The arbalests mounted on her maindeck loosed more bolts, fiendishly tipped in fire. Other bowmen stationed in her crosstrees released strings.
Inside of a second, the channel between the cliffs became transformed to a death trap. The narrows to the sea were bottled in. Outbound ships had the wind against their favour, their attempt to return fire robbed by the gusts of full range.
The first flights snatched short, flames quenched in small plumes by the sea. Through the unreeling first billows of smoke, Lysaer’s captains read their fate: no single vessel in the Havens was going to manage to claw free. They could wear ship and run, to slam aground on sharp rock, or they could hold course under barrage from the arbalests and burn with their vessels to the waterline.
From the clifftop, the Master of Shadow watched his works, drawn like glass under heat, then hardened into a brittle finish subject to shatter at a tap.
Caolle edged a step toward him, while urgency warred with reason. Every instinct of command that let him measure men shrilled an internal warning.
The fool who intervened now might upset a dire balance, fragile as the tension in a water drop.
‘The Havens,’ Arithon ground out in a whisper. The peal of laughter that followed caused Caolle to stiffen. He raised a hand, decisive, to deal a swift slap to break hysteria.
Moved by swordsman’s reflex, Arithon spun to block the blow; and the icy, pitiless sarcasm fixed into his expression checked his war captain cold.
‘I’m not going to snap,’ Arithon said, his tone incised like a sheared scrape of crystal over yelling and the harrowing echoes of the screams. ‘My half-brother may. Pray to Ath, if you know how, that he finds the cost of his blighted justice high enough to break his princely nerve.’
A choking drift of smoke fanned the defile. The wind-borne cinders from consumed wood and canvas arose in towering, tainted columns, incense from an evil sacrifice, to mask the too-bright gaze and features stamped still as chipped quartz. A gust tore through. Like an opening between a stage curtain, a tableau framed in carnage: the little sloop backed sail and bid for freedom, her decks laden down with prostrate wounded.
‘Dharkaron avenge,’ swore Caolle. ‘Give me the bow.’
When Arithon made no move to comply, the war captain snatched the last signal arrow from the earth, the one with white ribbons for cease-fire. He reached to pry the weapon from his sovereign’s grasp by main force and met a blinding fast recoil.
A demonic flare of irony lit the depths of green eyes. ‘Ah no,’ said Arithon. ‘No mercy. Not now. You’ll spoil my intent. There are men down there alive still, and in no mood for charitable action.’
‘Daelion himself!’ cried Caolle. ‘Let the wounded go! Ath forbid, she’s just a fisher sloop! This isn’t war you wage now, but pointless slaughter.’ He drew a scraping breath. Never had he foreseen the hour he must argue for mercy against a prince who, before this, had been too soft to sanction the necessary harsh measures.
‘You’ll do nothing,’ Arithon said, distant, tuned in to some altercation arisen on the water down below.
Over the noise, raised through the crack of flame by some fickle trick of the rock, sound winnowed upward from an argument in progress aboard the Khetienn. One of her crewmen was a sailor born in Merior, pleading exception to the order to blockade. ‘For mercy, let them by. That’s no soldier on that sloop, but a captain I’ve known since my birth!’
Then the brigantine’s commander, in diminished rebuttal. ‘Our orders stand. Get back to your post! Our liege was plain. We dare not cease fire until the signal.’
And Arithon gripped the black bow, a very statue of indifference. He did not ask back the white arrow while the sloop clawed bravely against the wind. His delay sealed her fate. On the Khetienn’s deck, the tinny clang of an arbalest sang sharp in release. Its quarrel arced out, and fire raged through the fishing craft’s sails like Sithaer unleashed. The screams as her burden of wounded burned alive racked the air, cut by a south shoreman’s curses for a prince who had once claimed false refuge in his village.
Caolle gripped the white shaft in locked fingers. ‘The clansmen are mine. I could pull them off, despite you.’
‘Do that!’ cracked the Prince of Rathain. ‘Then stand and endure the taste of my sanctioned royal justice. I’d take the heads of the ones who obey you for treason.’
No threat, but hard certainty; Caolle read as much. He spat in revolted disgust.
‘So many deaths,’ Arithon mocked him, vicious. ‘You say they’re enough. Well, half measures won’t serve. We’re not fighting against a man, or a moral, or a principle.’
‘Desh-thiere’s curse is your justification? Then I’m questioning that.’ As much as Caolle knew of the reasonless hatred and inspired lust to kill from what Jieret had related after past events at Minderl Bay, this act at the Havens broke the mould.
His hand on his sword grip, Caolle quivered to a chill that ran him through. He wondered how much of today’s slaughter was based any more on clear sanity.
Arithon saw Deshir’s war captain waver and redoubled his savagery to compensate. ‘Lysaer won’t stop for my mercy. I dare
not stop for his. Step back, Caolle! I’ll not be gainsaid, nor buy a cheap failure for the sake of one bleeding heart. The cease-fire will not be given, do you hear? Not for as long as one man under Avenor’s Ath-forsaken banner remains standing.’
‘If they’re all dead, who takes Lysaer the warning?’ Caolle cried.
Arithon gave back a nasty smile. ‘I’ll pick the envoys I need from among the least-hacked survivors.’
Caolle could not contain the rise of his gorge. He hurled the white signal arrow to Arithon’s feet, eyes inimical as black steel boring into his prince as his sword sang clear of its sheath. ‘You may not be sick,’ he said in a low, taut rage he had never before felt toward any man. ‘But by Ath, I am. For both of us.’
Arithon’s lip curled. ‘Don’t worry,’ he taunted before that steady, levelled blade. ‘If my foray here doesn’t raise enough terror, you’ll have your chance to shoulder the larger sacrifice. You’ll stand front and centre, up against forty thousand. I’ll watch you direct the bloodbath to stop the next wave when the warhost mounts the vale at Dier Kenton.’
Which urgent bit of viciousness slapped Caolle short. He did not challenge a madman, but encroached instead on a naked and tortured vulnerability.
The carnage at Tal Quorin had been done in heated battle, over the freshly gutted bodies of clan women and children. The Havens was a tactic wrought out in calculated cold blood to break nerves; to raise by brutal storm the very reasonless upset a seasoned man of war would never imagine he could fall victim to.
Stung too late for the impulse that had made him question his liege lord’s timing, Caolle recoiled against the uttermost cruel paradox: Athera’s Masterbard was no spirit to be forced to command here. Yet the half of him that was Rathain’s born prince was too much the man to relinquish the unendurable weight of sovereignty.
‘Ah, Ath, I can’t fight you.’ The war captain stood down, abashed. ‘Not over this. Not when you’re like to wish yourself dead over what you believe is stark necessity.’
Spared the searing coil of guilt and conscience, touched to a pity he could not bear, the seasoned campaigner turned his back. He hunched over his blade in staid misery and endured through the cries, the soft whine of bowstrings, the drifts of stinging smoke, until the assault upon the ships played itself out into soaked carbon. In time, naught remained beyond timbers quenched into steam and the pale, drifting knots of the bodies entangled by the incoming tide.
When at the last the white signal flew to end the bow-fire, Caolle was unashamedly weeping.
The men who descended to walk the scene of slaughter were hand-picked, all clansmen, veterans of the past butchery in Strakewood Forest. Arithon chose ones still bitter from the loss of their families in the grottos of Tal Quorin, who would not balk at unrelenting vengeance. The young officer with them was one of Jieret’s Companions, no stranger to dealing a mercy stroke to a man moaning helpless in fresh blood.
Others went along to bear litters for the lucky few chosen to survive.
Arithon led, still swordless. Under the merciless sunlight, he descended the gore-streaked stone, past men lying sprawled with eyes and mouths opened to sky; past others who were little more than boys, curled in agony over the slow pain of lacerations; the torment of an arrow in the gut. He did not hurry. The scouts selected to carry the wounded trailed at his heels, half-sickened by the stench of sudden death and hazed by the circling buzz of flies. They listened, struck mute, for their liege lord to speak; to point to the grey-haired captain panting in the half-shade of a niche, a broadhead pinned through a wrist. ‘That one.’
Two scouts peeled off, bent to the cringing victim, and lifted him, to bear him away in a drawn-out, jouncing passage up the cliff face to the ridgetop.
Downward, the party passed, into the shadowed throat of the Havens inlet. Now the air reeked of char and the tide-bared weed on the rocks. Arithon pressed footprints into a shingle fouled in the stains of dying men, past corpses piled like drift wrack. He stepped over discarded swords and slackened fingers, and once, a face blistered to featureless meat where canvas had fallen, still burning, upon a swimmer. Amid the carnage and dead, a young boy who had been a banner bearer sat, crying over blistered hands. ‘That one.’
The lad screamed as the scouts caught hold of him.
Arithon never turned his head. Straight as cold steel, he pressed onward, around the upset shell of a longboat, prickled with arrows. Two men underneath were alive and unmarked. ‘Those also, if they surrender without fight.’
One died on a clansman’s knife. The other, dazed and sobbing and out of his wits, was herded back up the cliff trail, past the first, settling flap of black vultures; the croak of feeding crows; and the inevitable, sinuous, circling flight of the wyvern pairs, sailing the breezes to scavenge.
‘That one and that one,’ to a couple of seamen adrift on a plank, one with an arm half-torn away, and the other supporting his companion.
Not every face was a stranger’s. Nearby a sailhand off the doomed fishing sloop from Merior lay on his side, scarcely alive, his laboured breaths in low venom reviling the name of the Master of Shadow whose merciless act had brought him, crippled and blistered, on a shingle heaped over with corpses. Arithon passed him, wordless, his gaze straight ahead. From another group lying arrow struck, one mortally, he pointed, ‘Take the one with the slashed shoulder.’
When the chosen man-at-arms was forced away from his fellow, he cried out, ‘For pity, what’s to become of my friend?’
Arithon did not answer, but walked on. The litter bearers who manhandled the weeping townsman to separate him from his prone shipmate knew in cold surety, but said nothing. Ones their prince did not designate were to die where they lay, a swift mercy stroke to end their suffering. The scouts followed a scant pace behind with their bloodied knives. By strict royal orders, they did their grim work unabashed before the horrified eyes of the few winnowed out to survive.
The strand at the Havens was emptied of living men inside of three hours, the unburied skeletons discarded for the wyverns to pick. Khetienn ceased her blockading patrol, braced around, and slipped seaward, to draw clear of trammelled waters and air sifted dim with spent smoke.
Shepherd archers and clan scouts who had never descended to witness the charnel ruin on the beachhead were broken into small groups, then sent under Caolle’s direction to sites elsewhere. The men who had borne the litters, who had dispatched the fallen in stone-hearted, deafened efficiency, stood guard over an open-air camp. Their perimeter was centred by the sun-faded felt of a shepherd’s tent set up for use as a hospital.
The wounded brought away from the Havens were treated there by the same black-haired man who had designated who should be spared. He made his rounds, quiet, self-contained, and versed in the arts of healing. The remedies in his satchel had no witcheries in them. He spoke no unnecessary word.
‘What will the Shadow Master do with us?’ gasped a boy with a broken arm, held flat by two scouts as the bones were splinted. ‘Why were we saved, except for some fate more terrible?’
His plea received no answer. The small, dark man in still patience just finished wrapping the splints, his sure hands astonishingly gentle. Through air pressed close with the scents of stirred dust and the herbal pastes brewed to make poultices, he went on to bind a compress on the next man in line, who lay moaning in pain on a pallet with a gaping shoulder wound.
Behind, the instant the clan scouts released their constraint, the boy laid his forehead on his drawn-up knees to hide his face and weep in silenced fear. No one came to comfort him. The eyes of the clansmen who guarded the tent held no mercy, and the one who brought healing and succour for pain seemed deaf to any outcry of the spirit.
When the last wound was treated, the last shattered bone strapped straight, and the final posset doled out to ease suffering agony into sleep, the imprisoned wounded from the Havens were left to themselves. Late day sun slanted down from the heights, adding the scent of rancid felt to t
he reek of astringent herbs. Breezes bowed the tent’s door flap and billowed the saffron and rust patterns encircling the fire-blackened ridge post. In whispers thrummed to fear, those men still awake began to speak. They compared observations and quickly came to realize that, except for the fact no man in their present company bore a leg wound that would impair his ability to walk, neither rhyme nor reason attended their selection. Some had been taken in acts of rank cowardice, playing dead beneath the bodies of fallen victims. Others were singled out who had fought in cornered courage in some small grotto or tide-washed ledge.
‘Why were we spared?’ they asked, haunted over and over by the five hundred and forty of their fellows who had at one stroke been most pitilessly dispatched beneath the Wheel.
They numbered twenty-five, that had braved the landing at the Havens and lived.
For his spree of unbridled killing, the Master of Shadow had lost one, taken by surprise when a head-hunter knifed him from under a splintered shelter of beached planks. Two other scouts had suffered slight wounds in the course of their murdering work among the fallen. Those had been left to wait, bleeding in stoic patience, until the dark-haired man finished his ministrations to the enemy.
‘What if we’re to be sacrificed in some ugly rite of magecraft?’ said a veteran with a crippled hand. In the dimness of the tent as the day failed, eyes flashed and looked away while the boy in the corner, in tearing, sad sobs, finally wept himself into exhausted dreams.
Night fell over the Vastmark coast before Dakar the Mad Prophet mustered the courage to emerge and walk the site where the fighting company camped at the Havens. Amid the banked, rocky corrie set back from the cliffs, he threaded amid the cookfires of the clan scouts mustered to serve their liege lord. He overheard the talk, the coarse jokes, the jagged intervals of quiet someone always jumped to break with a laugh, a story, or a boast. The day had been won. In the spectre of widespread death, men celebrated and affirmed their ties to life. Being clansmen well hardened to the hatreds of entrenched feud, the odd complaint arose amid the brosy glow of satisfaction.