Dawn of Wonder (The Wakening Book 1) (31 page)

Aedan was trying to stir his mind but it resisted
his efforts like porridge gone cold. He had not been able to follow the speed
of Wildemar’s tirade, but the part about being easily followed had stuck. “I
was concentrating on hiding from the guards ahead of me,” he said.

“And you didn’t look behind you once!”

“No, I suppose I didn’t.”

Wildemar’s head twitched with feral vigour and he
muttered something potent under his breath, clearly disgusted.

Dun was grinning. “Will you make that mistake
again?”

“No. Never.” Aedan spoke on behalf of every ache
that racked his body.

“Good. Then I think this has been a worthwhile
experience. As to the matter of what you overheard – the birds were making such
a racket in the tree that you were barely able to determine the language being
spoken, let alone the words. If we hear otherwise, you will be moving back into
your little cell for a very long time. Understood?”

Aedan burned to ask about the archives, but the
look in Dun’s eye was not one to be trifled with. “Yes, sir,” he said, dousing
his curiosity and almost choking in the steam of internal protest.

“You had better get to the kitchen and put some food
in you. I want you down in the training hall by the time we begin. Run!”

The session was undiluted suffering. Aedan stumbled
through the exercises, accumulating a wide selection of bruises and giving
none. He fell off every obstacle and collapsed under every load. The classes
were worse. The wooden chairs were featherbeds and the lessons lullabies. His
name was spoken in sharp tones by every subject master.

Liru looked worried when she saw him – the story
had obviously spread the day before. Mistress Gilda was still in a dangerous
mood after her encounter with Peashot’s snake, so Liru kept pinching Aedan when
she noticed him drifting off. During a lull in the class, she turned to Aedan.

“You know what’s happening?” she whispered. “All
the disturbance – you managed to overhear?”

“I was told that I only heard birds chirping and
couldn’t understand a thing that was said.”

She looked at him with a frown that receded as she
caught his meaning. “It is a great pity then that you have not yet been taught
to speak bird,” she said, and dropped the topic.

For the rest of the week, furious whispering ran
like an infection through the academy. Everybody knew something – drought,
flood, plague, war, wild beasts and increased taxes – but it soon became clear
that nobody knew anything.

At the end of the week, when it seemed they could
take no more, the marshals’ quadrant was informed. Dun addressed the first-year
boys in the dining hall and explained the situation of the border threats.

“Diplomacy, it appears, has failed us. Prince
Burkhart has been in consultation with the generals and senior marshals this
past week and issued a series of steps we will be taking to fortify our defences.
It has been deemed a good exercise that all apprentices should contribute to
the proposed designs and strategies. As a result, the next few weeks will see
you spending far longer with Master Skeet. Other classes will be reduced.”

Dun left the hall, saying nothing about the rangers,
the storm, or the Gellerac history and what it implied. Aedan clenched his teeth
in frustration.

Glancing across the room, he noticed Malik and Cayde
smiling at him as though he were the punch-line of some joke. He had seen it
constantly through the week. They had been smearing him with every drop of
humiliation they could squeeze from his stint in the rat cell. Between them, they
had spread the word as far as they could, making him seem ridiculous to anyone
who would listen – which was almost everyone Aedan knew.

He had tried to ignore it, but the lingering exhaustion
was making him snappish. Dropping his spoon, he straightened up and glared.
They threw their heads back and laughed, along with several boys at their table.

Malik stood, pulled the hair back on the side of
his head and held his ear out as if listening for something, then he folded the
ear down on itself, mimicking Aedan’s, and pulled a face of mock misery as if
the half ear had made him deaf. The boys around him shouted with merriment.

Aedan’s temper flared. He grabbed his bowl and
took aim at Malik’s head. Just as he was about to release it, he felt a strong
hand grip his wrist. He spun around and scowled at Hadley.

“You won’t win like that Aedan. Remember what Dun
taught us – fear and rage can both make a man stupid. Malik wants you to –”

The sound of jeering laughter grew and it pushed Aedan
over the edge. He broke free of Hadley’s arm and flung the bowl with all his
might. It only brushed Malik’s head, but sprayed several boys with porridge, reaping
a storm of angry protests and three strokes of the cane, which did a lot better
than brush him.

That night, after Dun had called an end to the
study session, Aedan was easing himself into bed when Hadley walked over.

“You are playing his game Aedan,” he said. “And
you are going to lose.”

“Shut up,” Aedan said. He had no desire to be
counselled or comforted. He just wanted to be left alone. Where was the value
in misery when nobody would respect it? He wanted them to recognise the
consuming bitterness of his young life, not festoon him with a string of cheap
suggestions for brightening the scene.

“Don’t be a cur. Just hear what I have to say.”
Hadley was never easily put out.

Aedan made no response, so Hadley continued.

“Malik is going to carry on doing everything he
can to make you hate yourself and this place. It’s really obvious that he wants
you out, and at this rate he is going to succeed.”

“Are you trying to help him?” Aedan asked,
annoyed.

“No. I’m trying to help you, and you would see
that if you just let me speak.”

Aedan grunted.

“My suggestion is that you start thinking. When
you lose your temper – which you certainly know how to do – you lose your head
as well. You have to find his weaknesses if you want to take him on, instead of
just steaming up and exploding.”

“What weaknesses has he got?”

“The way he hates you. He would risk a lot to see
you leave. ‘Over-eager opponents always over-extend.’ Don’t you remember?”

Long after Hadley had retired, Aedan stared into
the darkness, considering his friend’s advice. Something did need to change. He
was being baited like a dumb carp and beached every time he bit. Yet when he
considered putting some vengeful plan into action, he felt no enthusiasm. He
wanted to live for bigger things than that. More importantly, he did not want a
war here, did not need an enduring enemy among his companions.

He had known enough enemies in his life.

If he succeeded in humiliating Malik, things would
only step up a notch. He’d seen that happen with Emroy.

And Malik was too cunning. He was never caught.
The taunts were always too small to be considered a problem by any of the
masters, but his own reactions were explosions. They would not go unpunished.

That was when he began to understand. Malik’s
cunning was not the problem; it was his own stupidity. He was taking the bait
while it was still insignificant. But if he ignored it, the bait would have to
be increased in size, perhaps enough to draw a master’s attention …

Yes, Aedan thought. That might work. Why get into
a tangle with a tomcat if there is a dog nearby?

When news of the border threat spilled across the other
quadrants, the whole academy was set abuzz. Students skipped classes, ignored
assignments, and gathered in clusters that hummed with a mixture of fear and
excitement. Strict discipline was applied to restore a semblance of order, but the
thrill of far-off danger had taken root.

The first-year marshal apprentices had spent three
weeks under a shower of information on defence and one week attempting to apply
it. Building for defence was far more involved than they had expected. The
detail was staggering – down to things like unsmoothed outer stone being
preferable to smooth, because, for some reason that none of them had
understood, it suffered less when being punished by catapults. They had
submitted their first proposals for Castath’s defence and were awaiting Skeet’s
feedback. The master marched into the class, slammed his books down on the desk
and snatched up a page of notes.

“Group one,” he barked, “you killed our whole city
within a week because you walled us in from all water. Group two, most of us
die outside the city because your barbican is so intricate and awkward that the
crush of people and livestock creates a killing ground for more than half the
population as they try to enter their own refuge. Group three, your huge
unmanned outer wall provides the enemy with complete protection from the
catapults on your inner wall. Group four, I told you that the maximum amount of
sandstone that could be mined, shaped and placed in five years was no more than
a million tons. Granite gives you less than a quarter of that because mining
and working it is so much slower. Even if I were to replace your granite with sandstone,
you have designed a system of defences that would take two hundred years to
construct.”

Skeet dropped his page on the desk and glared.
“Think boys, think. You need to consider the whole population and all its
demands, its resources and limitations. Then you need to become the enemy and work
out any possible way to get past your own walls, and re-design accordingly.

“The greatest minds in Castath are working on this
now. Try to consider what they may have overlooked. It would not be the first
time a young mind has seen what an older one has not.”

The boys shuffled into their groups to lick their
wounds and mend their plans.

“I told you the outer wall was going to be a
problem with the catapults if it’s that far away,” Aedan said to the four from
his dorm. “Let’s start again.”

Hadley made the first suggestion. “I say we dig a well
this time. If we don’t try to stretch the outer wall down to the river we can
broaden it and give it an allure.”

“I thought walls were meant to repel,” said
Peashot.

“It means a walkway on top. How did you manage to
doze in
that
class? Skeet was at his most dangerous.”

“Commitment.”

“If we are going to make the walls broader,” said Lorrimer,
“I want a talus – that’s the lower part of the wall that slopes outwards,
Peashot. Makes walls harder to dismantle, upsets siege weapons and deflects
whatever we drop – shoots it out into the enemy.”

The small boy might have reacted to Lorrimer’s
tone, but there was an inwardness about his eyes that suggested he had just
learned something.

“Here’s an idea,” said Aedan. “How about a moat on
the inside? It would encourage the Fenn soldiers to spend weeks tunnelling only
to get flooded at the end of their efforts. We could also use it to water
livestock grazing between the walls. It would be like a long dam. Could put some
fish in there too. Might be useful in a siege.”

The others nodded.

“Sorry Peashot,” Lorrimer said with a smirk,
“Livestock are the –”

“Oh, go shove a gizzard down your throat!”

The others grinned.

“An internal moat sounds good,” said Hadley,
“though I’m not sure if keeping it a secret is practical.”

“Even if they have spies to tell them, it would
keep them from tunnelling,” said Aedan.

“Tunnelling all the way through to our side yes,
but sappers only need to get the tunnel under the wall before they fire their
supporting timbers and collapse everything, wall included.”

“Alright, so it won’t stop sappers, but neither
will an external moat, at least not for long – they would just fill in the
section where they need to work. No! Wait. We
can
stop sappers. Wherever
we see them digging, we could wall off and dry out a section of our internal
moat, then dig a few tunnels of our own under the walls – and we could start
right at the walls, not way back like they would have to. We could listen for where
they are working, dig into their tunnel, release our moat and flood them before
they can set anything alight. Flooded tunnels would be useless if we kept them
flooded. Then we push loads of sand and cement into the tunnels to make them
solid again.”

“Might be difficult to intercept,” Hadley mused.
“How would you know which way to go when you’re digging.”

“I’ve seen lots of animals pinpoint burrowing prey.
Maybe we could train dogs or badgers or something to point our men in the right
direction.”

“Interesting idea,” said Vayle.

Everyone nodded.

“Something else that might help with this,” said
Vayle, “is some tensile strength to the wall’s rubble core. Remember what Skeet
taught us about the mortar we use – that it’s only strong with compression. That’s
why the wall collapses when a big cavity is made underneath. It gets pulled
apart, not pushed together. But what if we could combine stone and large tree
trunks placed inside the wall? Enough wood might be able to hold the stones up
over a cavity.”

“Wood rots,” said Lorrimer.

“It would be strong well beyond our lifetime. It’s
the most practical option. Any kind of metal would set the weapons production
back. I think layered tree trunks, perhaps with all their branches, would
provide decades of strength. Over time, walls could be rebuilt.”

Nobody was entirely comfortable with the idea of
whole trees decaying inside their precious wall, but they could not fault
Vayle’s reasoning, so it was added.

“If we have more stone to work with,” said Lorrimer,
“I’m for flanking towers with curtain walls.”

“Round towers,” Hadley added. “They might take
longer to build, but if we are going to put the moat on the inside, we’ll need
to strengthen the wall, and round towers are harder to undermine.”

“How about overhanging turrets then?” Vayle said. “They
use less stone. We could use the extra to thicken the wall or the talus.”

Hadley scratched out and scribbled as the ideas
flowed.

“One central watch tower,” said Lorrimer. “High,
very high, say two hundred or three hundred feet. And small watchtowers with
fire beacons on the six visible hills.”

“Instead of wasting all that stone on such a high
tower,” said Peashot, “why don’t we just stand you on top of the keep? But what’s
the point, anyway, of making it so high if we have towers on the hills?”

“Those watch towers can be ambushed. And if
there’s low cloud, we might not be able to see them.”

“But then your high tower will also be useless if
it’s got its head lost in the clouds.”

“Fine, then let’s have a few circular platforms
lower down on the tower so it is both a high and a low … what do you call a
place where you look for stuff?”

“Vantage point,” said Vayle.

Hadley added the note.

“How about we move our catapults to the outer wall?”
Lorrimer said, leaning forward and looking like he was really starting to enjoy
himself. “Can’t see why we didn’t do that last time.”

“We didn’t do it last time,” said Vayle, “because
our wall was too thin to be manned. It’s also a bad idea to put catapults on a
wall that isn’t strong and heavily defended, because if the enemy takes the
wall, they just turn the catapults around and we get attacked with our own
weapons.”

“Oh. Didn’t think of that.”

“We can do it now though,” said Aedan, “seeing as
we’ve used the extra stone to thicken it. Let’s also create a slow zone over
the approaching ground. The land around the walls is very flat, but it could be
spoiled with mounds, ditches, and stakes pointing away from the city. It would
be impossible to run across a field like that without stumbling and getting
impaled. And it would slow the approach of assault towers. The slower their
approach, the more time they give us to bombard them.”

“How far out would the slow zone need to start?”
asked Hadley.

“Our sling catapults have a range of about three
hundred and fifty yards, maybe four hundred with a good height – no, what was the
word, Vayle?”

“Elevation.”

“How about embankments?” Peashot asked, clearly
pleased at remembering something from the classes.

“We’re going to be doing a lot of digging
already,” said Hadley. “Let’s put that in the post critical stage.”

He sketched a rough overall design, compiling the
ideas and labelling the stages, one to four. They all looked at the result,
feeling rather pleased about it, all except Aedan.

“Something bothering you?” Lorrimer asked.

“I was just wondering about how many catapults we
would need to build to cover all approaches. I was wondering if we could design
a smaller supporting catapult, something that could be taken apart, carried off
and reassembled quickly. That way we could set up hundreds of them where the
attack falls.

“How about,” said Peashot, sitting up with a jolt
of confidence as he detected a subject he understood well, “how about we soak
the rocks for the catapults in blue or white stain so they are harder to spot
against the sky?”

They laughed. It was just the sort of trick
Peashot would come up with.

“That could work,” said Aedan. “Let’s ask if we
can test it. But have you noticed how rocks often plug and stop when they hit
soil? Here’s another idea – curved taluses and catapults that fire big discs
directly down the walls the same way that you roll a wheel down a bank.” He
waited for them to get the picture. “The problem is that a boulder stops
regardless of whether or not it has hit anything of the enemy’s. If we had
massive, heavy discs rolling across the battle field, they would have many
opportunities to hit something.”

“I like the idea of the rolling discs,” said Vayle,
“but I’m not sure how good it would be for the mortar in the walls if we are
going to be using them to direct every shot. How about firing them onto the
battle field the way you roll a wheel from above your shoulder.” He cut a disc
of paper, perched it on his shoulder and wrapped his hand over the top, then
slowly illustrated the motion of throwing and spinning it so that it bit into
the ground and rolled forward.

“What’s happening here?” Skeet demanded, marching
up. “Disintegrating into games are we?”

“No, sir,” said Vayle. “Aedan had an idea to use
discs instead of boulders in the catapults. I was trying to show how a disc
could be hurled with spin so that it runs when it lands.”

Skeet’s brow furrowed with contemplation. “It’s
not a bad idea. We have more than enough giant pines to spare and we could
build saws to cut, but a disc is not stable – it will just tip and fall.”

“Yes,” said Aedan, “but even if it only travels
for fifty yards along the ground, that’s fifty times better than a rock. We
could also give it a broader reach if we put a spikey axle through it.”

Skeet nodded. “The release is going to be the
tricky bit,” he said, mimicking the throwing action. “This will not be so
easily achieved with an unthinking machine. But it’s a blazing good idea.” He
drifted into his own thoughts, moving his wrist and studying movements. Finally
he nodded. “What else have you designed?”

Hadley showed him the rough sketch of their plans.

Skeet asked one or two questions, but appeared
satisfied with the responses.

“Your stages are faulty,” he said when they were
finished. “Your plans would leave us exposed for longer than we can afford, but
your rolling discs and some of the “wrong” things you’ve done, like trees in
the wall and putting a moat on the inside to double as a reservoir –
interesting, problematic but interesting. Wait here.” He snatched Hadley’s
rough sheet of paper and strode from the room, stopping in the doorway to
address the class. “You would do well to listen to this group’s ideas,
especially Aedan’s new concept. This is the sort of thinking we need.”

Aedan tried to hide his smile. None of the other
groups approached his; each was clearly more intent on their own designs, but
some attention was being directed his way.

Over the past days, he had pointedly ignored
Malik’s escalating attempts to provoke another outburst. It looked like the
pale antagonist was at it again. Several of the boys were now glancing between Aedan
and a sheet of paper that Malik was busy with, their amusement growing. After a
few moments the page was held up for the class to see. It was a crude stick
drawing. “Aedan” and “enemy soldiers” were written under the respective
figures. The meaning did not take long to sink in. The figure of Aedan was
removing a cowl from his head, and the enemy soldiers were running in fright.
Boys burst out laughing. Cayde and Warton clapped Malik on the back.