"I will abide," said the warchief. "He owes me somewhat, this Wise One."
"Good." The Icefalcon rose. "Then let us ride, o my sister," he said.
Bright against the green-black trees, a red scarf flashed, slashing to and fro.
"They're in sight," said Melantrys of the Guards.
As when wind passes over a standing grove, with a single movement the men and women on the north watchtower bent their bows, hooked the strings into place. Another movement-another wind gust the soft deadly clattering of arrow shafts.
The same wind moved Gil, automatic now but still rich with heightened sensation in her mind and heart: the spiny rough feathers, the waxy smoothness of horsehair and yew. From the watchtower's foot the narrow road led down to the Arrow River Gorge, champagne-pale between clustering walls of mingled green: fir, hawthorn, hazel, fern.
Rustling muttered above the breeze shift of the trees. Sharp as the red arbutus in the ditches came the whinny of horses.
"The fat bleedin' shame of it," sighed Caldern, a northcountry man so big he looked like a thunderstorm in his black Guards tunic and coat. "Whatever you do, lassie, don't kill the horses. We can aye use 'em."
Rishyu Hetakebnion, Lord Ankres' youngest son, whispered to Gil, "Do you think we'll turn them back?"
He'd spent hours dressing and braiding his hair for this occasion. He hadn't liked being put in the north tower company as a common archer, but his father had insisted upon it: If you're going to give commands one day, you must first learn how to obey them.
Gil shook her head. "Not a hope."
The leading ranks of the Alketch army came into view.
It is no easy matter to count troops and estimate materiel through a hunk of ensorcelled ruby an inch and three-quarters long: scrying can tell a wizard where and if, but seldom how many.
By the time Melantrys and Lank Yar, the Keep's chief hunter, returned from reconnaissance with the news that the Alketch troops numbered nearly eleven hundred strong, the enemy was only hours from the Tall Gates.
They were armed for siege, too, Melantrys said. Mules and oxen hauled two "turtles," constructions of log and leather designed to protect soldiers while they undermined towers and walls.
With a full muster of the Keep's available warriors and all ablebodied adults to back them up, Janus estimated they could hold the Tall Gates for a time, but against trained men the cost would probably be terrible.
"With all due respect to Mistress Hornbeam and Master Barrelstave," he'd whispered to Minalde at the tense convocation that had followed Melantrys' return, "one seasoned warrior properly armed can account for half a dozen volunteers. Leavin' aside that we can't afford to lose a soul here, their line'll cave.
And for what?"
The commander of the Alketch troops was a srocky goldenskinned Delta Islander in an inlaid helmet bristling with spikes. He drew rein just where the road curved on its final approach to the Gates, and Gil could see the choke of men behind him, armored in bronze and steel and black-lacquered cane in the milky light of the overcast morning.
Looking at the Tall Gates.
"That's it," murmured Janus, a few feet along the makeshift wood rampart from where Gil stood. He wore full battle gear, something fewer than half the Guards possessed: black enameled breastplate and helm, rerebraces and pauldrons and gloves, unornamented save for the gold eagles of the House of Dare.
"Think about it real good before you come on, me jolly boy. Surely there's another party you can go to instead?"
But Gil knew there wasn't. With the slow-growing cold of the Summerless Year, even the settlements along the river valley had waned, dying out or succumbing to bandit troops. She had heard that the situation in the Felwoods was worse.
The Keep of Dare in its high cold vale was the last organized center of civilization for many, many leagues, the last large, stable source of food production. Elsewhere was only banditry, White Raiders, and spreading chaos.
There was no other party to go to.
For the past seven years, the people of the Keep had been working on the watchtowers of the Tall Gates. They'd repaired the old stonework as well as they could without proper quarrying tools and raised palisades of sharpened tree trunks around the platforms on top.
Bandit troops had burned the towers twice, but even before the disaster of the Summerless Year it had been hard to get draft animals to haul stone up from the river valley.
Gil would have bet a dozen shirt-laces they would be in flames again within an hour, had she been able to find a taker.
Between the towers another palisade stretched, a rough chevaux-de-friese of outward-pointing stakes, hastily cut and sharpened, fired hard, braced in the earth, and interwoven with all the brush that could be gathered to make the hedge thicker yet.
Eleven hundred troops, thought Gil, her gloved fingers icy on the arrow-nock. They weren't going to turn back.
Battle drums echoed in the high rocks of the pass, ominous, palpable in the marrow of the bones. The golden commander edged his golden horse aside. The ranks parted-ebony soldiers from the Black Coast, ivory from the White, and the red-brown D'haalac borderlanders.
Variegated banners lifted and curled in the morning wind. For some reason Gil remembered old Dr.
Bannister of the UCLA history department, dry and fragile as a cast cicada skin, standing at the lecture-hall podium saying, "Henry II marched his armies against Philip Augustus..."
Just that. Marched his armies. No wet boots and feet that ached with cold. No rush of adrenaline or hammering heart at the thought: What if I die...?
Marched his armies.
The turtles lumbered eyelessly to the walls.
They were sturdily built, Gil had to give them that. She couldn't imagine how they'd gotten them across the Arrow River. She saw the overlapping hides black with water-they must weigh tons-and heard the squeak of the overburdened wheels.
Arrows rained down from both gate towers, answered from slits in the walls and roofs. Gil wasn't fooled.
The men inside only waited for the real attack, the attempt by soldiers on foot to take the turtles.
"Come on, Ilae," whispered Melantrys, drawing, nocking, firing like a machine behind her tangle of beams and brush, "do your stuff." The nearer turtle lurched and rocked a little, then came on. Gil guessed that Ilae's spells of damage-broken axles, jammed wheels, wouldn't have much effect.
If Bektis could lay a weather-spell on the pass that would hold a storm there for almost forty-eight hours-and by the clouds still roiling over the Hammerking it was even yet going strong-his counterspells of ward on the turtles would be more than sufficient to thwart a novice like Ilae.
Certainly when the men poured forth from them and began hacking and rending at the chevaux-de-frise between the towers, they showed no immediate signs of being affected by whatever panic and terror-spells the girl could muster.
Rudy could probably have summoned better ones, but again, if Bektis had had sufficient time to manufacture wards and amulets against such spells, probably even Ingold couldn't have done much.
On the other hand, Ilae's fire-spell transforming the entire barricade into a wall of flame worked just fine.
Men scattered back, dropping their shields and falling under the steady downpour of arrows. Gil's forearm stung where the bowstring smote the leather guard.
Her fingers smarted, and smoke teared her eyes and made it hard to aim. More warriors pressed forward from the throat of the pass, armored and bearing big man-covering shields.
Camp slaves, unarmored and dragging brush, came up behind them, piling the tinder around the walls of the watchtowers: "Right," said Janus softly. "Time to be off, children. I guess they really, really want in."