The Hammer of the Sun (63 page)

On the field they had fled few thought ahead to that. There was no rejoicing, for so utterly drained and exhausted were they in body and mind that they could scarce take in the fact of victory, let alone its scale and consequence. When the horns sounded their release the weary soldiers of the shieldwalls could only sink down among the bloody mud, grateful for even a brief respite, a moment of life where neither man nor weapon menaced them. Gradually, as they grew used to the vast wind-scoured silence that had replaced frenzied tumult, they began to realise what they had done; but the awful cost of it was clear to all. Of the armies of Kerys and Morvanhal together, that had numbered some thirty thousand men, there remained only seventeen thousand alive, and well-nigh two thousand of those grievously enough wounded to be unable to fight. How many Ekwesh had fallen was never tallied; but it is generally agreed that out of a full force of some fifty thousand not twelve thousand had joined that mad flight into the darkness, and four thousand at most survived it. All around them, then, as far as the distant foothills, as near as the trampled paste at their feet, the stench in their nostrils utterly inescapable, that darkling plain was carpeted with the broken limbs and the spilled blood of at least fifty thousand men. No other description of the scene than that is given in any chronicle; and none is needed.

There could be scant celebration in the midst of that horrendous carnage. The salute with which the armies greeted Elof as he came gliding clumsily in on the back of night rose hoarse and grim from their throats; but a salute it was. Exhausted, the force of his wings long spent, he missed his precarious footing and landed hard in that noisome mud; but he lost no time in reporting to the king all that he had seen. Kermorvan nodded, as if he had conjured up the rout already in his mind's eye. "I hoped as much. Victory is ours; and yet it only flutters before us, to be blown hence if we do not stretch out a hand to seize it, however weary. We must march out at once to lay siege to the High Gate itself!"

"Must we indeed?" interrupted one of the nobles of Kerys. "My lord, you have worked great wonders, but at great cost; do not wastefully make it greater!" Elof bit his lip; it had swiftly become clear that the vast majority of their fallen, as many as eleven thousand, were Kerysmen. This might easily have been because they were so much wearier and worse fed for months before, less well fed and skilled in war; but malicious tongues would not be found lacking to suggest that Kermorvan had spilled those lives to shield his own folk. His horsemen, in particular, he had been most sparing with.

"Aye, my lord!" put in another noble. "Your will swayed the battle well enough, but can it whip up limbs whose strength is spent, hasten hearts at the brink of cracking? For your own folk I cannot speak, but the men of Kerys are foredone; they must rest, or perish!"

"If they try resting on this freezing butcher's slab they'll perish anyway!" growled Roc. "Of cold in the night or pestilence tomorrow! Better die on the march than that!" But Kermorvan raised a commanding hand. "You are both of you right, my friends. But no dispute need arise, because our forces must be divided in any case. The High Gate has two approaches, and we must lay siege to them both. What I command, therefore, is this; hot on the heels of the Ekwesh shall go the forces of Morvanhal, and any others who wish it. But the men of Kerys, who have suffered more in the march here, may descend into the valley and there find shelter and fuel for fires among the trees. But having rested for a few hours, they will cross the frozen river, climb the northern slopes and lay siege to the Gate from that flank, blocking all approaches, and watchful for new forces
coming from the north. You will travel faster than we then
, because you know the land, and will not have to deal with stragglers. But all this must be accomplished by dawn, and no later; that is your charge, my lords."

So it was that three long columns filed away from that terrible field, and left it empty beneath the gathering darkness. Three, for not even the wounded could be suffered to linger, lest the carnage breed disease; Kermorvan was sending them, with such comforts as could be spared, southward towards the landings. But his own forces he led with little or no respite up into the hills, walking like the least of his footmen to spare the strength of his horses for when it might be needed. In this, and in much else, he was proven wise; for many times that night, as the column wound like a long snake through a mass of little hills and vales, it was set upon by bands of Ekwesh diehards, willing to make desperate and damaging strikes in search of food, or simply revenge. Cavalry proved the most effective answer to such depredations, charging swiftly and frightenly up and down the long lines; it was for such a chance, in victory or retreat, that Kermorvan had reserved them.

But there were other enemies abroad against whom cavalry was of little use. The breeze was freshening as they neared the sea, but the clouds stayed obstinately solid; they marched without light of moon or star, and as few torches as they dared. In the shifting of darkness shapes seemed to move, shadows to skulk at the edge of vision. They were not all illusions. Among the deepest shadows of the dales dark things snarled and slunk away from Ekwesh corpses, or flitted up like great bats. Men who straggled or strayed from the main column, even a short way all too often vanished without trace; in one deep dell, overgrown with thorns, three men vanished. When Roc took a party of Ravens to search for them, they found only bloodstains and strange foot prints; and at the sight of those the Ravens all but dragged him away. The mounted scouts seemed to rove safely enough, until Elof, serving as one since he had perforce to ride, found two of them dismembered in the shadow of a giant boulder; even as he summoned help he himself was snared by the huge arms that reached over the top, and almost met the same fate before lancers and mounted bowmen arrived to slay the brutes. Kermorvan, inspecting the scene as the column plodded past, grimaced at the rivulets of dark blood upon the rock, the tangles of greyish fur hanging over its edge, and the yellow tusks grinning moistly between tautening lips. "Our old friends the snow-trolls," he remarked, his face drawn and pale, as he watched the columns come plodding up the slope. "Three of them, come back to finish what their cousins of our land failed in long ago. I almost thought they had succeeded."

Cold shivered on Elof's neck. "Thanks to your foresight, they did not."

"Thanks to my horsemen; they heard you before we did. Those brutes! They were not even killing out of hunger; the remains of some twenty men lie behind that rock, set neatly to keep in the snow." He shuddered. "I could curse this land, but it is accursed already; what will cleanse it? What will sweep away this dreadful night?"

"The wind, maybe," remarked Ils, limping up to them. "Feel it; it blows stronger, and we have marched a good five hours now. We must be nearing the sea." The chill breath touched Elof's neck again, and he realised it was real; it blew away the reek of slaughter, and touched his lips with the keen tang of drift. Together they hurried up to the hill-top, and even as they climbed they saw that the heavy clouds had begun to shift, solid no longer but stirring, rending, tearing; here and there pale gleams shone through the gaps, and the snow-clad hills around them stood out silver-clear against the deep blue skies.

"The banners of the Ice break and grow ragged!" said Elof. "Let it be a signal to her!" But even as he spoke they reached the summit, and Ils cried out and pointed. They had reached the sea indeed; at the base of that long slope it lay, its surf all but deadened by the ice that choked its shores. But they hardly spared it a second glance, for there, only a little way to the north of them, the High Gate also had awoken to life, shining and shimmering like some monstrous jewel beneath the sinking moon.

From the battle plains they had seen the gleam of ice enshrouding it; but now they stared in wonder and horror, and many rubbed their eyes, as if some glamour of magecraft were laid upon their sight. Even in the few short hours since
last they saw it, it had changed and grown, its battlements
glittering beneath crowns of dazzling snow, its galleries hung about with icicles of incalculable size and beauty, its stern walls lost beneath rippling depths of translucent blue and green, rich as sapphire, deep as the sunlit sea. They seemed a greater architecture in themselves, a palace of ice that encased, enveloped the ancient stronghold of stone almost mockingly, a shell of vast columns that dwarfed the original structure, immense blue-lit pillars that tapered down even into the frozen cascade of the waterfall below Its stern lines softened into curves as sweeping as an icebound wave, its straight unworn walls swirled and ornamented with fantastic shapes, the High Gate in all its grandeur was reduced only to the barren core upon which something vastly more majestic was founded. It was a towering vision of the might and nobility of the ancient Powers, a creation of unhuman beauty and strength so great that it awoke a yearning ache in the hearts of all who gazed upon it, as if they were children looking from their own scrawled slates to the supreme jewel of some great master's mind and hand, and seeing the vast gulf that separated diem, their own joys shrivelling the petty things they had been so proud of. It was beauty that struck men like a blow, and cowed them.

And just as it mocked their ideals, so equally it seemed to laugh at their warlike ambitions; for what could any assault launched by men mean to such walls as those? How could they be assailed, being ice deeply overlaid upon stone, doubling the strengths of both? Who could scale that wall of slippery glass, or hurl stone or dart against it? The largest throwing weapons of men would be as helpless against it as slingshots in the hands of their children. In every sense it seemed to tower above them, this awesome thing, as indifferent to their hatred as it would be to their worship; they might do either, and it would scarcely matter. A great silence fell over that whole army, men fell upon their knees, or shrank down behind their shields, or simply stood and stared at that eerie fortress of the cold as the moon sank slowly down behind it, crowning it with light and leaving them once more in darkness. By its mere existence it cast down their hearts and held their minds in thrall.

Elof felt no such urge to bow down, though he shared in their awe; the undertow of horror and revulsion it awoke in his mind was too great for that. In the fate of that noble fortress, encased within that sternly glittering shell, he seemed to see a vision of the impending fate of the whole rich and varied world that he loved, and of Kara most of all; and it came to him now that it might be too late to prevent it. Was the chilly triumph of that vision, the sudden burgeoning of it, an earnest that the crucial point had already passed, the balance already tilted? Had the cold hands of the Ice closed at last upon the world?

So he was held, as was each of them in their own way. In the end it was Ils' voice, loud and sardonic, that broke the silence upon the hill. "A pretty toy, if it's to your mind! But don't mistake it for more solid craft! What's this beside the high mountains, eh? That Ilmarinen forged from the very earthfires; and gave to us as a refuge and a home, when last these chilly Powers sought to plaster the world thus in their tuppenny trumpery!" She gave a snort of scornful laughter, echoed by Gurri and the other duergar, and thumped Elof and Kermorvan hard upon the back. "Look with the eyes of the Elder Folk, you fools of men, and don't be deceived by mere melting charms!"

Kermorvan shook himself, massaging his neck and blinking like a man awaking from a long and haunted sleep. "I wondered why the clouds broke so conveniently," he muttered. "When she might have held them. She was readying her defences; she meant us to see the place clearly."

"And now it'll work against her!" whooped Ils triumphantly. "Look alive, man, and don't just stand there blinking! It'll be dawn soon - a clear dawn! And what have we laboured so long on our weapon for, if not for this?"

Kermorvan gazed down at her a moment, then flinging aside his customary dignity he caught her up and kissed her with startling vehemence. Then, setting her down gently he seized a horn from one of his captains, and blew a piercing blast. It coursed like a shock of lightning through those still ranks; men jumped and shuddered where they stood shaking off the subtle thrall the vision had laid upon them. "
Morvan morlanhal
!" he shouted, the ancient and bitter battlecry of his line. "
Morvan shall arise/
Up, all of you, and into your ranks once more! Stand firm upon the living earth, feel your blood flow and heed no sendings of the barren Ice! Form up, and await the dawn!"

His clear voice rang against those glittering battlements, challenging and defiant; and it seemed to awaken a response in the world around them, from the depths to the heights of the very skies. For even as the army took up his battlecry and sent it roaring like a tide against the castell-ations of the Ice, so in the east behind them came the first faint gleam of light, grey at first but turning swiftly to the palest gold. And as the men came streaming past, summoned by horn calls to form their shieldwalls across the hill-top, answering calls came echoing out of the still-dark chasms below the falls. Kermorvan nodded in satisfaction, and pointed; up the far flank of the vale wound what looked like a serpent of golden lights. It was the army of Kerys, hurrying up from its warm fires to take its appointed place among the northern hills, and close the siege of the Gate. "I commanded them to keep well back from the fortress, in the shelter of the hills, until any actual assault," he remarked.

"That was wise," Elof answered, though inwardly he writhed at the thought of what must follow. "It gives us a freer hand. And I think we will need it."