“Another war?” asked Yaarike, but mildly.
“Our enemies’ final destruction,” said Suno’ku, and for a moment Viyeki saw the hard stone of which she was made, the unbending determination of her blood and upbringing. “We cannot share this land with them—surely we all agree on that. Eventually, one of our races must perish. On my oath as a Queen’s Sacrifice, I will make sure it is the mortals.”
Porto’s father, dead these nine years, had been a carpenter. Porto spent much of his childhood in the Rocks, scrambling up and down ladders, fetching tools, and holding boards in place, so he volunteered to shore up the ranks of army carpenters in cutting and preparing a new pole to hold up the head of the great Bear.
The ram’s iron head was immense, but Isgrimnur’s men had found an ancient grove of trees at one end of the abandoned city before the mountain, and some of the older trunks there were almost unbelievably large. The leader of the duke’s carpenters, a quiet but short-tempered man named Brenyar, chose a peppered birch over sixty cubits tall, a fit size to use for the battering ram’s shaft. The wood was very hard, but Porto and a dozen others ax-wielders brought it down in less than a day and began to trim away the largest branches while other workers chopped down smaller trees to make rollers, which would let the great ram smash against the gates at greater speed.
Porto liked the work, but he had asked to join the carpenters in large part because he so badly needed to get away from Endri, at least for a short time. Since arriving at the mountain he had spent much of every day taking care of the younger man, cleaning his wound, giving him water, and trying to keep him warm and fed. He also had listened, and listened, and listened, because despite his weakness, Endri almost never stopped talking. Half the time he was inaudible, his speech little more than murmured sighs, but other times he wept with pain and begged his mother to come and take him home. After days of this, Porto was beginning to feel as though it might turn him mad.
Before leaving to help the woodcutters and carpenters with the day’s work, he had managed to get Endri to take a little broth from their thin morning stew, made from a few tiny potatoes and an even smaller handful of soft-footed mushrooms he had gathered. The boy had not only eaten some but also managed to keep it down as well. That had heartened Porto, and as he wrapped Endri up in his own cloak, thinking that the active work in the ancient grove would be enough to keep himself warm, Porto promised the youth he would find something better for their pot that evening. But as it turned out, by the time his work was finished he had little strength left to hunt rabbits or squirrels, so he traded a tiny handful of potatoes to one of the other woodcutters for a bit of salt beef. It would take a while for the dried meat to soften and flavor the stew, Porto knew, but what else did he have here at the cold, gray end of the earth but time?
Endri was asleep when Porto got back to the camp. He made no attempt to wake him but added wood to the fire and put the dented pot on it to boil, which took much longer here than at home. He had chosen a spot separate from the rest of Duke Isgrimnur’s troops so that Endri’s moaning and mumbling would not keep the other soldiers awake, and now he scoured his tiny fiefdom in search of herbs for the pot. He found something that looked like white onion grass, and when he cautiously nibbled it he found to his delight that it tasted like the stuff as well. He pulled up a large handful and returned. The pot was just beginning to bubble.
“Ah, you’ll like tonight’s meal,” he said as he squatted beside the fire. “Endri, are you awake yet? You won’t taste a finer one even in the duke’s tent.”
Endri said nothing, so Porto leaned over and gave him a gentle shake. “Come on, lad. If you don’t get up, you’ll miss the feast.” But something felt wrong, as though someone had stolen Endri away and replaced him with something solid and immobile.
Porto turned the youth over. Endri’s face was slack; his eyes were open, but already they had filmed over. He did not look peaceful, but he did not look pained, either, and that was a small solace. He had been dead for hours.
The meal forgotten and the water boiling away to nothing, Porto slumped down beside the body and wept until the wind made his cold, wet cheeks burn.
He did not want to bury his friend in direct sight of the looming mountain, so he dragged the body to a clearing in a stand of young evergreens at the outer edge of the grove where he had been working. As the long northern twilight waned he scraped and hacked at the hard ground with his axe until he had made a trench deep enough to keep Endri safe from scavengers. Porto reluctantly took back his cloak but felt like a robber for doing it, so he made a bed of pine branches and then cut more branches to make a blanket to cover the body. He briefly considered taking the young man’s prized Harborside scarf to return it to the lad’s mother, but in the end he could not do it. Never once had Endri taken it off, and his pride in his old setro had been one of the most notable things about him. Buried in this bleak, foreign land, without a tombstone, he could at least go into the next life with something he prized, something that had reminded him of his home.
As it grew darker and the stars, like shy children, came out to watch him, Porto laid his friend in the grave and covered him over with fragrant pine boughs, then carefully filled the hole with earth. As he piled heavy stones on top to protect Endri’s resting place he could hear other soldiers camped just a short way from him, their quiet conversations beyond his hearing but their voices murmurous as a river, and he wondered in a strange, empty way how many of them would also lie cold beneath these skies before all was done. At last, as night settled onto the north, he kneeled beside the mound and recited the few prayers he could remember.
“So began the Siege of Nakkiga.
“The mortals in their thousands swarmed across the plain at the mountain’s foot, making their camp in the fallen houses of our ancestors like snakes in an ancient wall, bringing their great ram and other engines to attack our city’s gates. At first the queen’s Sacrifices and other orders were in disarray, but Marshal Muyare of the Iyora clan and his descendant-cousin General Suno’ku took the remnants of the Sacrifice army and began to train all Hikeda’ya, male and female, old and young, for a desperate defense of Nakkiga.
“Nor were the other orders idle, and many deeds of unsung heroism were done by the Builders of Lord Yaarike to shore up the city’s defenses, and by the Harvesters of Lady Luk’kaya, who labored long and hard in the mountain’s deep gardens to feed the people after a long era of war and its hardships.
“The Celebrants and the Echoes bound the other orders together in a web of shared thought. In the midst of all these measures, Akhenabi, the Lord of Song, prepared his order for a great strike against the mortal enemy, to weaken their hearts and turn the taste of their presumed triumph to ashes in their mouths.
“At first all that our people could do to fight the invaders was to attack them from above the gate, tunnels, and emplacements dug in centuries past by the Builders of old. Hikeda’ya struck from secret places along the mountainside, which had long fallen out of use and had to be cleared anew. From these hidden places the finest archers of the Order of Sacrifice rained death on the Northmen, killing many more than they lost.
“Yaarike’s Builders, working with the masters of both the Singers and the Caster engineers, created machines which could throw fire and flaming bolts down on the attackers from these high places, and at first these new engines found great success. Three times did the Northmen try to bring their great ram to the mountain’s gates, and three times were they driven back, their hoardings in flame, and many of the ram’s wielders dead or terribly burned.