Damsel Knight (19 page)

Chapter 21

The white mare dances through the river of people with the grace of her rider.

Sir Julius leans sideways so suddenly that Bonnie has to cling to his cloak so she doesn’t fall off. Grabbing a younger boy by the scruff of his silk shirt, he pulls him close. It’s then Bonnie realises she’s misjudged his age. Fear makes him look young, but he’s older than her. Seventeen, maybe eighteen.

“Women and children to the palace gates. Men to the city walls. Are you a man or aren’t you?”

“Yes sir. Yes.” The boy - because she can’t think of anyone so frightened as a man - nods his head jerkily like a puppet. When Sir Julius lets go, he shoulders his way back through the flow, toward the wall.

“They’re at the gate!” Sir Angus yells across the crowd, his giant black horse pacing back and forth on the small rise of the golden road. A dozen of the bearded knight’s men follow him, weaving through the crowd on their horses. Neven sits on a pony so small, he has to fight to avoid being swept away.

The white mare reaches the top of the rise, and peering around Sir Julius, Bonnie sees the wooden gates bulge and creak inward. Men in soldier’s red and normal clothing swarm the walls, firing arrows, spears, and whatever they can downward. One man holding a spear squeals, then disappears over the edge as someone on the other side tugs him down.

“The iron will hold them!” One of Sir Angus’s men calls out, voice betraying nerves that the words do not.

It’s true that the secondary gate stands between the gate and the city, thick iron rings forming an impenetrable wall between stone and road. But seeing it doesn’t give Bonnie the ease it should.

“It might!” Neven calls out from his little pony. “But the wall won’t.”

The wall is barely taller than the gate, and only wide enough to hold two men walking side by side. The druids designed it under the King’s orders like most of the rest of the city. It’s made to protect those in the city - but from magic, not people. The spells woven into the stone might stop those who use magic crossing anywhere but the gate, but over the ordinary human it has no power.

“They’re there,” she says softly. “They’re already there.”

And they are. While the gate still splinters outward, she can see figures fighting on the top of the wall. They’re few, and quickly overwhelmed by the men already there, but as soon as one is pushed back over the edge another five seem to take his place. Their clothing is odd. A mixture of tan cloth and mail with a dizzying amount of straps and pockets. From the stories she’d grown up with, she’d expected them to charge into battle half naked and covered in paint. Instead they look more organised than their own soldiers.

“They’ll take the wall before we get there!” Sir Angus shouts. “We have to get the oil. We burn the slums before they reach them!”

Bonnie’s eyes see what he means to do, but her brain refuses to wrap around it. The slums are in a dip at the very edge of the wall. The buildings are just far enough away from their neater cousins to ensure the fire would stay on the outside of the city. It’s a protective mechanism built into the structure of the city. Pour oil by the bottom of the wall and light it, and you can guarantee the flaming liquid will pool by the cramped buildings around the edge of the city, and nowhere else.

Her heart skips a beat. How could someone build homes, invite people to live there, knowing that one day they might decide to set fire to those same homes. How could you knowingly let people live in what was a giant pile of firewood, waiting for a match.

“We have people on those walls!” Sir Julius yells back. “And hundreds will be waiting things out in the slums far enough from the fighting. You know what will happen if we light it. The entire edge will burn. Women. Children. Not to mention the men still fighting.”

Sir Angus glowers at them, the crowd finally thinning around his horse. The women and children would be safe for now in the palace walls, and the men would do their duty - unless they were killed by the enemy, or their own side. “The war horn is blaring. They had their warning.”

“There hasn’t been a drill for hundreds of years. Most won’t know what it means!” Sir Julius spurs his horse forward. “If they make it to the slums, light it. But there has to be more than our men to take down. Hundreds at least. And right in the middle of the slums. We’re not burning off our arm to scorch their toes.”

Bonnie turns to see Sir Angus’s head nod grimly. The man barks orders to his men.

Neven gallops after them as fast as his pony can manage. Within minutes they’re through the dip in the golden road that counts as the slums - this close to the road nothing more unsavoury as a few thinly placed stalls, and respectable looking inn. The wall looms over them, but only because they’re right next to it. It’s scarcely higher than the walls of the inn.

Sir Julius leaps off his horse and runs up the stone steps to the top of the wall. Bonnie follows, more clumsily. Near the top she almost falls, and she’s surprised to feel the tug of the sling against her neck as her cold arm reaches out with her good one to break her fall. She still can’t feel it, but this time when she tries to move it the fingers more than twitch - they close together to make a weak fist.

It’s getting better.

She scrambles the rest of the way to the top of the wall. She’ll celebrate later, if they survive this.

In her haste to see, she bangs into the back of Sir Julius who stands motionless at the top, soldiers rushing about him. He doesn’t move, looking over the edge as still as a statue.

Feeling suddenly that she doesn’t want to see, she peers around him to the ground below. She blinks several times, but what she sees doesn’t change.

There are barbarians as far as she can see. Not hundreds, but thousands of them. Some are on horseback, others on foot. Each wears tan cloth woven with dulled mail with links smaller than any she’s seen. Thin looking tan takes up most of the jacket, with patches of mail on the shoulders, and rings along the arm. The chest of every uniform is a large patch of mail in the shape of a roaring dragon. They wear squat hats of tan and black. Some wear thick woman’s skirts covered in squares of tan and black, while others wear trousers of plain tan.

A group rams against the gate with what used to be a tree trunk. Others mill as close to the wall as their numbers can manage, climbing with thin wooden ladders, and in some cases on each other’s shoulders.

One of the few mounted looks up and seems to see her. He raises a bronze shield with the golden face of that same roaring dragon as on his chest. Only, the golden dragon on his shield seems to move. The jaw stretches wider, and all around the face little bronze and silver circles whirl into life. The golden eye opens, changing into a dark circle that seems to stare at her.

Neven’s body weight knocks her aside just as something small and fast flies by her ear.

They land sprawled on the rough stone, his limbs tangled with hers. Her heart thuds fast in her chest, knowing that something bad had almost happened but not what. “What was that?” She asks, pushing him off her.

“I think-” He stops, his face waxy pale, but his brown eyes alert and focused. He points a finger a little way along the wall where an old man lies, staring with unseeing eyes at the sky above. Blood pools under his head, and a tiny hole sits in the centre of his forehead. “The same thing that did that.” His voice trembles on the last word, finger wavering as he seems to notice the man he’s pointing to is dead.

Nausea rises in her throat as she looks around to see more dead and wounded. For a moment her skin itches like it’s on fire. Everything’s too hot, too loud, too present. She pictures herself running down those stone steps, all the way along the golden road to the safety of the palace where death doesn’t leap out of thin air to bite you between the eyes.

Then she forces her resisting mind to picture what happens next. Neven and Sir Julius, and all the others burning. A no doubt short life of wondering if she could’ve changed things.

“An arrow?” She says, making her eyes look at the dead body. No that’s not right. It didn’t feel like an arrow when it passed her. And the man’s wound is wrong. It’s too perfectly round.

Neven pushes himself into a crouch. “Then where is it?”

“Someone took it out?” But why? She can understand taking the arrow out of a living person, but what’s the point in taking an arrow out of the dead?

Sir Julius half crouches on her other side. “And where are the archers?”

She blinks. That’s right. There were no archers down there. Yet up on the wall there are dozen with those little wounds with no arrows to be seen.

“I think it’s like my shooters,” Neven says, lifting his arms. She’s not surprised to see the metal bracelets still there. He’s worn them so long they seem a part of him. “Only how they’re supposed to work.”

There’s a giant wooden structure taking up most of one section of the wall. She pushes herself to her feet, walking toward it as Neven starts explaining to Sir Julius how his metal shooters work. She weaves through soldiers and laymen, her good hand on the hilt of her sword in case she has to draw it quickly.

It’s on wheels, pulled up against an outward jut to the wall that seems made for it. It’s a complicated mess of wood and metal, but it seems familiar. Neven used to make something like it when he was younger, right down to the bowl on the edge of a stick. He’d draw that bowl back with something in it, and then bam. He’d let go and the stick with the bowl on it would fly forward chucking its cargo into the sky.

Bonnie never understood why he didn’t just throw the object himself, but now she understands. These must be the catapults her father talked about that were so useful for throwing heavy objects at dragons. In the bowl sits a barrel marked oil, and by the side of the catapult sit several more.

A common misconception. A lot of people think it’s better to throw oil or some other flammable liquid on a dragon and set it alight. In reality, if you’re very lucky you might get enough around their face to cloud their vision with smoke. That’s it. Dragons are heat and fire, and a little more is nothing to them.

You’d get a better reaction with cold water. It doesn’t harm them, but it can annoy them enough to make them turn tail and fly away.

“The catapults are modified for high targets like dragons,” Sir Julius says, stepping beside her. “Or we’d use them. Now help me arrange our lines better. Your friend had a plan to clear the slums, but we need to hold until the women and children get to safety.”

Neven comes running back along the wall, weaving clumsily through the men. A tan arm lurches over the edge of the wall, quickly followed by head, torso, and other arm holding that moving shield. Neven sidesteps with the grace of the truly terrified.

Bonnie draws her sword, but before it’s fully out of the sheath Sir Julius steps forward and shoves the man back over the wall. The barbarian is flying through the air before he knows what’s happening, his thin ladder toppling behind him.

Sir Julius then moves off, walking down the wall barking orders at the men.

“I did it. It should happen any moment.” Neven stalls beside Bonnie, looking at the catapult. “I could modify it to shoot lower. It shouldn’t take long.”

Acting on impulse, Bonnie squats next to one of the barrels, heaving it over the lip of the wall. A heartbeat of normal battle noises, and then a sickening crunch and splatter as it shatters open below. She hears screams, but there are already so many, she’s not sure if she caused them.

“Or you could do that,” Neven says, staying well away from the edge.

A booming fills the air, so deep it vibrates through the stone under their feet. It’s not like the war horn. It’s more like the sound she imagines might happen if two giant mountains crashed into each other. She’s heard it before, played once a year at the square so they remember what it sounds like, and what to do. The dragon horn.

She scans the bright noon sky to see if she can see Gelert, or maybe the golden dragon. Around her several others do the same. She sees nothing but Neven looking pointedly at her from out of the corner of her eye.

Right. No one had been expecting humans to attack, but they had expected a dragon to attack. What to do next would be clear in the civilians mind, and it would not include staying in the tinderbox slums with a dragon flying about. Even if the dragon could not find a way to cross the magic barrier of the city walls, its fire might.

Now they just need to give the civilians enough time to get to the palace.

Neven stares at the barrels with a thoughtful look on his face. “I have an idea.”

***

“Now!” Sir Julius calls out.

As one men all the way along the front of the wall upend their barrels of oil, the liquid splashing on the men below. A few of the larger men chuck barrels as far as they can manage. Then the line of men behind them throws a wealth of wood into the crowd. Floorboards, great chunks of wall, and even an inn sign.

“Not too close to the edge,” Bonnie says, holding out the torch.

Neven nods, taking it. “If I’m right this will go up fast. Get ready.” Then he throws the burning torch over the edge.

Seeing the fire, several other torches fly after the first, along with a few leftover scraps of wood. She’d steeled herself, but she still takes a step back in surprise at how quickly it all goes up. One moment it’s a crowd of drenched people batting aside pieces of wood. The next the flames are higher than the wall, and as hot as Gelert’s flame.