Finally, he knew that his twenty-five men killed twenty Hashomi and lost only ten themselves. The fighting came to an end, and the bodies of the enemy were stripped and thrown off the cliff. Blade pulled his own dead and wounded back into the tunnel, and the bridge after them. Leaving the tunnel guarded, he ran back to the hospital in time to meet Giraz coming down the cliff with the first reinforcements.
By dawn the hospital was firmly in Blade's hands. Some of the women and servants were half-mad with joy, most were too stunned to react at all. The doctors and priests were allowed to work under close guard. One of them loudly refused to treat the enemies of the Hashomi, and was promptly heaved off the cliff. After that the others saw the wisdom of obeying Blade's orders.
By noon the last of Blade's men was down, except for a small guard left on top of the cliff to give warning of any Hashomi effort to get around Blade's rear. Shortly after noon the first of the valley people arrived at the foot of the cliff. They were farmers and a few women, for the moment apparently more curious than anything else. None of them tried climbing the trail to join Blade.
These people scattered hastily when the first Hashomi arrived, fifty of them. The Hashomi spread out around the end of the trail and along the foot of the cliff. They shot off a few arrows to test the range, then settled down to wait. Blade stared down at them, and could imagine them staring up.
He did not intend to do much more staring, or leave the Hashomi with time for it.
Chapter 24
Blade's men couldn't afford to sit on the ledge above the Valley of the Hashomi forever. There was a spring of fresh water that would supply them until the end of time, but the food in the hospital would only last about ten days. Before that, the Baran's main army was supposed to push its way into the valley, or at least send reinforcements and supplies through the mountains to Blade.
The night after Blade arrived, he sent a strong force down the trail to the valley floor. Half of them fought their way through the guarding Hashomi and marched out into the valley, stealing all the livestock they found.
The other half went to work with axes, chopping down trees and building a fortified stockade around the bottom of the trail. They'd finished by the time the cattle raiders returned. The livestock was driven into the stockade, and a ditch dug around the outside of it. Now Blade had a fortified strongpoint on the valley floor and several tons of fresh meat on the hoof to add to his supplies. The Hashomi had lost forty more men as against Blade's twenty. They'd also been given a pointed notice that they'd better take him seriously, or it would be worse for them. Blade intended to march everywhere in the valley and carry off everything and everybody that wasn't nailed down, if the Hashomi were fool enough to let him.
That day he had a barricade of logs and stones built halfway down the tunnel. Now he had a line of defense to hold even if he lost control of the bridge. Then he had the doors in the tunnel unlocked: Some of the caves were empty, while others held nothing but skeletons and stenches. A few held living prisoners.
Most of the prisoners were farmers, craftsmen, and women who hadn't been willing to play their assigned roles in the Hashomi's scheme of things. A few were Hashomi who'd been too openly skeptical of the Master's wisdom.
All of them were more than ready to greet Blade as a liberator, and fight the Hashomi and the Master with all their strength. Unfortunately, few of them had the strength to get out of bed, let alone raise a sword. So they were carried into the hospital and put in charge of the doctors. At least they would keep the doctors too busy with medical duties to have time for plotting.
Blade wanted able-bodied supporters from the valley people, though. Or at least he wanted to give the Hashomi the impression that he expected to get them. That was the next job.
The last fifty men to come down the mountain each brought one piece of a small catapult. The catapult was now set up and put into action. From the roof of the main hospital building it could reach out nearly a mile into the valley.
Blade kept it firing all day and all night. It shot spears, bundles of arrows, stones, bags of nails and broken glass, filled chamberpots, and anything else that would hurt if it hit somebody. It also fired sacks made of old sheets and filled with appeals to the people of the valley.
«The end of the Hashomi is at hand. Their doom approaches. Freedom for all those who have been their slaves is coming. Kill them. Take their weapons. Gather up food and come to the House of the Free Men by the hospital on K'baq Cliff.»
That was one message. There were many others, most of them written by freed prisoners who had the strength to sit up and use a pen. Dozens of the messages were fired off each day, and sometimes the winds in the valley caught them and carried them far beyond the range of the catapult.
It became a point of pride among the defenders of the hospital to keep the catapult going. When a beam broke, one of the hospital carpenters and one of Blade's men carved a new one from a timber of one of the huts. When the rope broke, the women cut off their hair and braided a new one that made the catapult more powerful than before.
It also became a point to count how many people fled to the House of the Free Men-and how many Hashomi were killed in the process. Both figures mounted steadily. Every night shouts, screams, the clash of weapons floated up from the valley, as refugees tried to make their way through the line of watching Hashomi. Several hundred succeeded. As many more died, but so did a good many Hashomi.
Eventually the guards grew so strong that the valley people stopped trying to get through. By that time there were more than two hundred Hashomi tied down, watching Blade's force. Nearly that many had been killed or wounded since Blade arrived at the hospital.
«That makes four hundred Hashomi the Baran will not have to face when he and his men reach the head of the valley,» said Blade. «We haven't finished with them, either.»
«True,» said Giraz. «But I don't imagine they've finished with us, either. If the Master is as you say he is, it's going to take all the running we can do to keep ahead of him.»
«Also true,» said Blade, and began giving orders to prepare the hospital for defense. The ditch around the stockade was deepened and timbers placed in the bottom, jutting upward. Blade's archers kept the Hashomi at a safe distance until the work was done.
Other archers were placed along the trail from the stockade up to the hospital, at every place where the slope might let a Hashom climb up. During daylight they carried improvised drams to give the alarm, by night they had torches.
Still more archers were stationed along the rim of the hospital's ledge, with a clear field of fire down into the valley. At first the Hashomi tried to keep a line of bonfires alight all along the base of the cliff. They quickly discovered this made them excellent targets for archers they could not even see, let alone reach from four hundred feet below. The Hashomi then tried maintaining their watch without fires, and the valley people at once started slipping through again to join Blade. At last the Hashomi had to draw back and form their line of guards out of range of both the archers and the catapult. That tripled the length of the line and the number of men needed to maintain it. Blade had now tied up a force of Hashomi greater than his own strength, apart from the two hundred casualties he'd inflicted. He'd lost no more than eighty killed and wounded.