By the time the man drew back his arm for a third blow, Jorian had his sword out. A straight thrust took the unarmored man in the ribs. The Fediruni still had the strength to complete his cut, which clanged on Jorian's helmet, knocking it down over his eyes and filling his head with stars.
Jorian pushed his helmet back into place, to see the Fediruni leaning against the merlon. The scimitar dropped from his lax fingers as the man slowly sagged to the pavement.
Meanwhile, another Fediruni had hoisted himself through the embrasure. This man carried both a scimitar and a leathern buckler in his right hand. Over his brown robe he wore a crude cuirass of boiled leather, painted red and blue, and on his head a light steel cap with a slender spike on top. As he came, he shifted the buckler to his left hand and engaged Jorian. There was a quick exchange of cuts and thrusts; the man was a skilled fighter.
Out of the corner of his eye, Jorian saw a third Fediruni, with his shaven skull bare, climbing through. If the third man gained the wall and assailed him from behind, Jorian knew he would have little chance. Despite the hero tales, it was rare indeed that a single swordsman could defeat two competent foes at once. If Jorian took his attention for a heartbeat off the man he was fighting, the fellow would instantly have him.
He tried to speed up his cuts and lunges to kill the man before the other came. But the man caught the blows on his buckler and sent back one whistling counter-cut after another…
The third man had reached the wall and slithered around behind Jorian, who knew what was happening but could do nothing to stop it. Then a shriek arose behind him, and the sound of a falling body. The eyes of the man he was fighting shifted past him, and in an instant Jorian ran him through the throat.
"Here is another!" cried Chuivir, drawing a bloody sword from the Fediruni behind Jorian. "Help me!"
The colonel referred to a fourth Fediruni, now poised on the topmost rung of the ladder with a scimitar in his teeth. Jorian and Chuivir each drove the point of his sword into one of the two uprights.
"Over!" said Chuivir.
They shoved. The ladder swayed out. It seemed to stand balanced for an incredible time, while the topmost Fediruni looked down with eyes that widened with terror in his swarthy face. The last sight that Jorian had of him, as the ladder toppled, was of the man's opening his mouth to scream and dropping the sword he had held in his teeth.
"That was close," said Chuivir. "They have gained another foothold yonder; come along!"
The two rushed along the wall to where several Fedirunis had formed a solid knot with their backs to an embrasure, while others, climbing up the ladder from behind, tried to push in.
"Watch!" said Jorian.
He put a foot on the adjacent embrasure and hurled himself up on top of the merlon. A small, slender Fediruni was just pushing through the embrasure behind the knot of battlers. At the moment, he was on hands and knees in the embrasure.
Jorian swung up his arm and brought his sword down in a long, full-armed cut. He had the satisfaction of seeing the man's head fly off, to roll among the trampling feet of the fighters. The blood-spouting body collapsed in the embrasure, and through Jorian's mind flitted a fleeting thought of wonder that so small a man should contain so much blood. A scarlet pool spread out on the flagstones, so that the fighters slipped and staggered in it.
The body hindered the next climber, who pushed and tugged at it to clear it out of the way. While he was so engaged, Jorian caught him in the face with a backhand cut. The man fell off the ladder, carrying away those below him in a whole concatenation of screams and crashes.
"Hand me a crutch!" Jorian shouted.
A spear was at length passed up to him. With this he pried one of the uprights of the ladder away from the stone and sent it toppling. The Fedirunis on the wall, cut off from support and slipping and falling in the puddles of blood, were soon beaten down and hacked to pieces.
Panting, Jorian, in dented helm and rent hauberk, confronted Colonel Chuivir, around whose left arm a physician was tying a bandage. Below, the Fedirunis sullenly flowed back towards their tent city. They carried many of their wounded; but many more were left behind, along with hundreds of corpses.
"Bad?" said Jorian.
"Scratch. You?"
"Never touched me. Thank you for your help."
"No trouble. When and whence is the next attack?" asked Chuivir.
"Soon, north. The north clock is set an hour after the east."
"The Free Company, eh?"
"Aye. Not many, but fell fighters."
"With that armor, they will not be able to climb so monkeylike. Adjutant, everybody but the skeleton guard to the North Wall!"
An hour later, the Free Company withdrew from the North Wall, leaving scores of armored figures lying like smashed beetles at its base. Jorian, bleeding from a cut on the side of his jaw, told Chuivir: "The pirates next."
The houses that had been illegally built against the West Wall, facing the waterfront, furnished the pirates with an easy means of getting halfway up the wall. They made several lodgments on the top of the wall and clung to them despite the hardest fighting; Jorian took another light wound, on his right arm. But the houses, being inflammable, soon blazed up under a shower of incendiary missiles from the wall. Pirates struggling to emplace short ladders on the roofs of the houses were engulfed in flames and died screaming.
By the time the clock on the south side of the Tower of Kumashar showed the third hour, Mazsan's peasant army had heard about the defeats of the other three forces. There was talk of a mysterious mixup in timing, and of the unexpected strength of the defenders. The yells of Mazsan's officers and even blows with the flats of swords failed to get the peasants to rush the wall. They stood sullenly muttering; some began to trickle away.
Trumpets blared in the hills. Little black specks grew to squadrons of the regular Penembic cavalry, riding down the East Road and deploying.
"Tereyai!" shouted voices along the wall, as the frontier army rolled into view.
As the word went round, Mazsan's peasants dissolved in mad flight. The Fedirunis, fearful of being cut off from their homeland, abandoned their camp, swarmed on their camels and horses, and scattered. The Algarthian pirates scrambled aboard their ships, cast off, and hoisted sail.
The Free Company struck its camp in orderly fashion. It formed three hollow squares, with pikes leveled outwards in all directions and crossbowmen inside the squares. The mercenaries marched leisurely away on the North Road, as if daring anybody to try to stop them. No one did.
"My boy!" cried the king. "You have saved Iraz! Nothing were too good for you! Nothing!"
"Oh, come, sire," said the bandaged Jorian, affecting more modesty than he really felt. "All your servant did was to sit up half the night tinkering with the clocks, to make the four dials register different hours."
"But that proves the prophecy. Or rather, both prophecies. You are the barbarian savior, and the salvation of the city depended upon the clocks' functioning—albeit not quite in the sense that one would expect, heh heh. Name your reward!"
"All I want, Your Majesty, is that copper bathtub."
"Forsooth? Well, it is a queer sort of reward; but if that is your desire, you shall have it. Shall we have it delivered to Doctor Karadur's quarters?"
"Nay, sire. Leave it where it is for the time being. But one of these days I shall want it. And one other thing!"
"Yes? Yes?"
"Pray stop calling me a barbarian! I am only an honest craftsman, as civilized as the next wight."
"Oh," said the king. "We see the difficulty. You think of a 'barbarian' as a rude, uncouth, illiterate oaf from some backward land where they know not letters and cities. But in the prophecy, methinks, the word was used in its older sense, to mean any non-Penembian. The change in meaning took place during the century preceding this one; we told you we used to be a bit of a scholar.