She reached out-
He was preparing an attack.
She felt well-slept and immensely strong. She walked across her solar to the windows on the outer wall, three hundred feet above the fields below, and looked out.
Her fields seethed as if covered in maggots.
Her feeling of revulsion was more than physical.
A pair of her novices, alerted by her movements, appeared with a cup of warm wine and a fur-lined robe. She drank the one and shrugged on the other while the older novice brushed her hair.
‘Hurry,’ she said.
She put light shoes on her feet, pulled the mantle of her profession over her fur robe and was off while the creatures in the fields below were still merely a tide lapping at the foundations, and not a mighty wave.
She collected the crozier – the crooked staff that the Abbess bore by tradition, with a curious green stone head.
And then she ran, like a much younger woman, for her bower – her apple tree.
She was shocked to find another there. Not just there, but swimming in her power.
‘Master Magus,’ she said, coming to a stop.
‘Lady Abbess,’ he said. ‘I’m working.’
Even as she paused, he raised his staff. His power was visible. His whole form gave off tendrils of power.
The Lower Town, Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
The captain watched the enemy’s creatures gather. They were well within bowshot, and No Head and his fellows began to pink them. The two youngest archers carried sheaves of fresh shafts from the second floor, and the older men began to loose.
The captain had seen archers in action before, had watched his men practise at the butts, but he’d never watched a dozen professionals at full stretch.
He’d fussed at No Head while the older man felt the breeze, and carefully arranged his sheaves in brackets for the purpose set into the wall – little iron buckets.
The two senior men – No Head and Kanny – raised their bows, loosed, discussed their aiming points, and watched the fall of their shafts.
‘Over,’ said Kanny. It was a different tone of voice from his usual hectoring, barracks-lawyer voice.
‘Over,’ No Head said. ‘Ready, lads?’
He raised his bow, and every man on the tower raised his in emulation, and they all loosed together. Their arrows rose and rose, and before they had begun to fall the next flight was on its way.
Down on the plain, the distant irks screamed their defiance, showed their hooked teeth, patted their backsides and hefted their spears.
There were a thousand of them – more, most likely. In their homespun greens and their leathers and brown skin, they looked as if they’d been grown from the earth under their feet.
The first flight of arrows struck. They all struck together, and tore a small whole in the great patchwork of brown-green irks.
The phalanx of spears moved a step closer.
The second flight struck.
And the third.
And the fourth.
The regiment of irks started to look like a piece of leather on a shoemaker’s bench punched with an awl. And again, and again. The punches only made small holes. But it made a great many of them.
The irks screamed, their handsome elfin faces contorted into masks of rage, and they charged.
‘Fast as you can, boys,’ No Head called.
His arms became a blur of motion. He drew and loosed, took a shaft from his bracket, nocked, drew, and loosed so quickly that the captain had difficulty sorting his actions.
Brat, the youngest archer, opened a linen sack and dumped the shafts, points first, into No Head’s bracket, and ran to load the next archer.
Kanny was grunting with every draw. The sound was so frequent and rhythmic it was obscene.
The irks had little or no armour, and no shields. As they crossed the three hundred paces to the breaches in the northern wall, they left a trail of wounded and dead creatures behind them. It was as if the whole phalanx was a wounded animal, bleeding little corpses.
They reached the first breach.
Kanny ran dry of arrows, and had to pause to get his own bundle. Brat couldn’t keep up. One by one, the bows stopped twanging.
‘They’re not going anywhere,’ No Head said calmly. ‘Don’t rush. Everyone get their quivers full again. Brat, you get one more load up here and join us on the wall.’
The captain felt superfluous.
Lissen Carak – Sauce
Cuddy watched the first charge out of the slits of one of the covered ways halfway up the ridge. Then he ran down the steps to Sauce.
‘They’re going to need help,’ he said.
She glared at him.
‘We can hit them from down there,’ he said, pointing to the lower path. ‘With arrows.’ He continued. The men-at-arms tended to forget the power of the bows.
Sauce paused. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Let’s go!’
They pounded down the track – over a streambed, down steep steps, around a long curve, and then they were right above the Lower Town. The wall had a fine low parapet, and the Gate Tower was just a hundred paces away and almost at eye level.
Cuddy admired No Head’s archery for three long breaths. The shooting was continuous, now, and the flow of shafts like a waterfall crashing down on the irks in the field. The creatures died and died.
It was clear to Cuddy that the irks were defeated. Archery combat had a ruthless logic of its own. Cuddy was an expert in it.
‘Five shafts,’ he said to the men around him. ‘Right in the midst of them. Fast as you can.’ Two of his guildsmen had crossbows – not really worth a thing in a fight like this.
Oh, well.
‘Ready?’ he called. Every longbowman had five arrows in the ground, ready to hand, and another on the bow. Long Paw had one on his bow, one in his bow hand, and four in the ground.
Cuddy raised his bow.
Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
The irks broke.
The new arrows came from behind, plunging down and killing them. In a minute a tenth of their numbers were pinned to the ground, screaming their thin screams.
Lissen Carak – Sauce
‘Save your shafts,’ Cuddy said. He had only fifteen more. High above, on the ridge, he could see valets starting down with bundles of arrows, but it would be ten minutes before those arrows reached them.
He pointed to the town. ‘Some of them got in,’ he called to Sauce.
‘Are you happy to stay here?’ she asked.
Cuddy nodded.
‘Men-at-arms – on me.’ She waved to Cuddy and started for the postern gate.
Long Paw winked at Cuddy as he followed her.
Lissen Carak, The Lower Town – The Red Knight
The captain went to open the tower’s lower door himself. He and Ser George were the only men without bows.
Sauce was outside, with a crowd of armoured men. ‘Town’s full of irks,’ she said. Her sword was in her hand, and behind her, men were cleaning the dark blood from their blades.
He nodded. ‘We have to keep the street clear for sorties,’ he said.
She nodded. ‘That’s going to suck,’ she said in a matter-of-fact voice. And took her party to move stones and fallen roof tiles.
The captain went with them.
It was brutal work. As the spring sun rose it burned, distant and orange, through the smoke-filled air. It was growing warm, and inside forty pounds of chain and plate, and a heavy quilted arming cote, it was hot.
Just bending to lift a stone was hard enough in armour.
It took five of them to lift a fallen roof beam.
When they began to complain, he pointed out that it was their horses who would come through here in the dark.
They went on, picking up rubble, pushing obstructions aside.
After an hour, the captain was soaked through. He collapsed on a low stone wall and Toby handed him a flagon of water.
Thump-snack.
‘Son of a bitch,’ the captain cursed, and the stone slammed into a church fifty paces distant, blowing a hole through the tile roof and vanishing inside.