Towards evening, one of the youngest of the knights rode back to the main body, and led them off to the right, north, and then up to a steep hill.
Without a word, every knight dismounted. They drew their long swords from their saddle scabbards, split into four groups of fifteen, and walked off.
The Prior waited a moment, looking at the two messengers. ‘Wait here,’ he said, aloud. The first words Galahad had heard from any of them since they left the Royal Camp.
The black-clad knights vanished into the woods.
An hour passed. It was cold – the spring evenings were longer, but not much warmer, and Galahad couldn’t decide whether he was cold enough to take his great cloak out of the bundle behind his crupper or not. He didn’t want to be caught dismounted at the wrong moment. He cursed the Prior and his silence.
He kept looking at the older messenger, Alweather, who waited, apparently calm, without fidgeting, for the whole hour.
‘Here they come,’ Galahad said suddenly.
The Prior walked up to his horse and sheathed his sword on the saddle. ‘Come,’ he said. He was smiling.
He walked off up the steep hill, and all the horses followed him.
‘Uncanny,’ Alweather said. He spat, and made an avert sign.
They wound around the hill, widdershins, climbing as they went around. It seemed a tedious way of getting to the top, but in the very last light, Galahad could see that the crown of the hill was steep and girt in rock.
The horse ahead of him shied, and then was quiet. Galahad looked down and saw a corpse. And then another. And another and another.
They were not human. He wasn’t sure what they were – small and brown, with big heads, and cords of muscle, beautifully worked leather clothes and huge wounds made by two-handed swords.
‘Good Christ,’ Alweather said aloud.
There was the smell of fire, and then they came over a crest.
The top of the hill was hollow. It was like a giant cup, and the knights had three fires going, and food cooking. Galahad Acon’s stomach, outraged by the inhuman corpses and their red-green blood, now seized on the smell of food. Pea soup.
‘Unsaddle your horse, and curry him,’ the Prior said. ‘After that, he’ll see to himself.’
Alweather frowned, but Galahad refused to be moved by the older man’s caution. Galahad was suffused with joy. He was living one of his secret dreams.
Alweather, clearly wanted to go back to the king.
‘They fought a battle,’ Galahad said, his eyes sparkling in the firelight. ‘And we didn’t even hear them.’
The Prior smiled at Galahad. ‘Not really a battle,’ he said. ‘More of a massacre. The irks didn’t see us coming.’ He shrugged. ‘Have some soup. Tomorrow will be harder.’
Lissen Carak
It was a quiet night. The besieged collapsed into sleep. Sauce cried out in her dreams, and Tom lay and snored like a hog. Michael muttered into his outstretched arm, sleeping alone. The Abbess wept softly in the dark, and rose to kneel, praying at the triptych that sat on a low podium in the corner of her cell. Sister Miram lay on her stomach to sleep, exhausted from healing so many wounded men. Low Sym woke himself up repeatedly as he shouted, and then lay with his own arms wrapped around him staring at horrors in the dark until the pretty novice came and sat with him.
But however long and dark the night was, the enemy was quiet, and the besieged slept.
In the first light of morning, they struck.
The Siege of Lissen Carak. Day Nine
Today, the enemy burned all the country around the fortress, as far as the woods. The men – the traitor Jacks – burned all the farms, all the steadings and barns – even the patches of woods.
The farmers stood on the walls and watched. Some wept. We were cursed for being poor soldiers, for allowing the fields to be burned.
The Abbess came out and watched, and then promised that it would all be rebuilt.
But many hearts turned. And before noon, the creatures of the enemy were in the air over the fortress, and we could feel them again.
Lissen Carak – Mag the Seamstress
It was a simple, unstoppable act that changed the nature of the siege, and that cut at the farmers and the simple people of the fortress more effectively than all the military victories that could be scored.
The first fires were visible to the north-east. Hawkshead, the furthest east of the fortress’ communities was put to the torch before morning creased the sky, and the last watch saw the town burn, just two leagues from the walls.
Just as the sun began to cast forth a ruddy light, Kentmere went up to the west. By then, the walls of the fortress were lined in farm folk. Then Abbington.
Mag watched her town burn. From this high, she could count roofs and she knew when her own cottage burned. She watched it with a desperate anger until she could no longer see which house was hers. They were all afire – every cottage, every house, every stone barn, every chicken coop. The fields around the fortress ridge were suddenly full of the enemy – all the creatures who hadn’t shown themselves in the first days. There were boglins, and irks; daemons and trolls, great things like giants with smooth heads and tusks which the soldiers told her were behemoths. And, of course, men.
How she hated the men.
The enemy was now girdling every tree. Orchards of apple trees and pears, of peaches and persimmons, were being destroyed. Vines that had grown for generations were gone in an hour, their roots destroyed or seared by fire, and every structure was burning. As far as the eye could see, in every direction, there was a sea of fire and Lissen Carak a dark island in it.
Mag couldn’t take her eyes away from the death of her world.
‘Sausage without mustard, eh?’ said a heavy voice at her elbow.
She started, turned to find the giant black-headed hillman, the company’s savage, sitting on the other barrel beside her, watching over the wall.
‘War without fire is like sausage without mustard,’ he said.
She found herself angry at him. ‘That’s – my village. My house!’
The big man nodded. He seemed not to know she was crying. ‘Stands to reason. I’d hae’ done the same, in his place.’
She turned on him. ‘War! In his place? This isn’t a game! We live here! This is our land. We farm here. We bury our dead here. My husband lies out there – my daughter-’ The tears became too much for her, but in that moment, she hated him more than she hated the boglins and their horrible faces and their willingness to burn her life away.
Tom looked hard at her. ‘Not yours unless you can hold it,’ he said. ‘Way I hear it, your people took it from them. Eh? Melike, their dead are buried there too. And right now, I’d say it was theirs. I’m sorry, goodwife, but war is my business. And war involves a lot of fire. He’s showing us that we only hold what we stand on – that he can win without taking the fortress. We hurt him last night and now he strikes back. That’s war. If you don’t want to have your farm burned, you had better be strong – stronger than you were.’
She struck him, then – a glancing blow, pure anger without force.
He let her do it.
‘Not many folk can say they’ve struck Bad Tom and lived to tell the tale,’ he said. He flashed a crooked smile in the early morning light, and she turned and fled.
Lissen Carak – Thorn
Thorn watched the farms burn with no great satisfaction. It was a cheap victory, but it would help break the will of the farmers to resist him.
He shrugged inwardly. Or it would harden their resolve to fight to the end. Now they had nothing to save but themselves, and even when he’d been a man, he’d had trouble understanding men. And, increasingly, he felt this contest was too complex for even his intellect. He had made himself the Captain of the Wild, and yet his own interests were scarcely engaged, here. He was far more interested in the puzzle that was the dark sun, and in her, then he was in the prosecution of the siege.