"Steady!" Giraldi bellowed, voice barely carrying over the din. "Spears!"
The shield-bearing centurions gripped their spears, faces set in a fighting grimace.
Below, the Marat charge hit the first razor-edged defensive spikes the holders had crafted out of the earth itself. Amara watched closely, her heart in her throat. The leaders in the Marat charge began to leap and skip among the spikes, looking for all the world like children playing at hopping games. Behind them leapt their animals. Amara saw some of the Marat, with heavy, knotted cudgels, begin to strike the spikes from the sides, shattering them.
"The ones with clubs," Amara said. "Tell the archers to aim for them. The longer we can keep the spikes in place, the harder it will be for them to pressure the gate."
Giraldi grunted and relayed her order up and down the walls, and the archers, instead of firing into the enemy at random, began to pick their targets.
Scaling poles and ropes with hooks fashioned of some kind of antlers or bone began to lift toward the wall. Legionares thrust at the poles with the crossguards of their spears, pushing them away, and some drew their swords to hack at ropes as they came up, while the archers continued to fire on the enemy. Arrows began to flicker up from the horde below, short, heavy arrows launched from oddly shaped bows. One of the archers beside Amara lingered in aiming his shot for too long, and an arrow struck him through both cheeks in a sudden welter of blood. The holder choked, dropping.
"Surgeon!" Amara yelled, and a pair of men on the wall moved quickly to the fallen man, dragging him down before going to work on removing the arrow.
Amara stepped back to the battlements. She swept her gaze over the
enemy below, but she couldn't see anything beyond a horde of Marat and their beasts, so many thousands of them that it was difficult to tell where one left off and the other began.
Giraldi abruptly seized her shoulder and dragged her back from the edge. "Not without a helmet," he growled.
"I can't tell what's happening," Amara panted. She had to shout to make herself heard. "There are too many of them."
Giraldi squinted out at the enemy, then drew his head prudently back. "About half of their force is here. They're holding the rest back, ready to bring them in when they get an opening."
"Are we holding them?"
"The walls are doing all right," Giraldi called back, "but the gate is our weak point. They attack the walls only to keep most of our men busy up here. There are too few men at the gate. They'll force the barricade sooner or later."
"Why didn't they craft the gate closed?"
"Can't," Giraldi reported. "Engineer told me. No foundation under it for extra wall, and the interior surface is lined with metal."
From below them there came a crunching sound and a sudden chorus of mixed Aleran war cries of, "Riva for Alera!" and "Calderon for Alera!"
Giraldi glanced out over the field again. "They must have gotten part of the barricade down. The hordemaster has ordered the rest of his troops in, and they're on the move. They'll try to put pressure on the gate until the defense breaks." Giraldi grimaced. "If they don't repel this first thrust, we're done for."
Amara nodded to him. "All right. Almost time, then. I'll be back up as soon as I can." She leaned out to look down into the courtyard below. She could just make out the forms of a couple of legionares standing their ground almost within the gate itself, spears thrusting. There were shrieks and cries from below, and Amara's eyes caught a flash of motion, a dark blade seen for only a second as its wielder spun it out behind him. Pirellus was holding the gate once more.
Amara hurried to the nearest stairs and pelted down them to the courtyard, looking around wildly. Hay from the bales she had crashed through earlier that morning lay scattered everywhere over the courtyard. All but a few of the wounded had been pulled back to the west courtyard, and the last of them were being loaded onto stretchers. She started across the courtyard toward the stables. As she did, she saw Pluvus Pentius emerge from one of the
barracks, white-faced and nervous, one hand wrapped around the hand of a little boy, whose hand stretched back behind to another child, and so on, until the truthfinder was leading half a dozen children across the courtyard.
Amara hurried to him. "Pluvus! What are these children still doing here?"
"H-hiding," Pluvus stuttered. "I found them hiding under their fathers' bunks in the barracks."
"Crows," Amara spat. "Get them to the west courtyard with the wounded. They're supposed to be fortifying one of the barracks to hold them. And hurry."
"Yes, right," Pluvus said, his skinny shoulders tightening. "Come on, children. Hold hands, and stay together."
Amara dashed to the stables and found Bernard sitting with his back to the wall just inside one of the doors, his eyes half-closed. "Bernard," she called. "The gate is under attack. They'll be coming."
"We're ready," Bernard mumbled. "Just say when."
Amara nodded to him and turned, focusing her attention on Cirrus, then sent him up and out into the sky, feeling for the windcrafters she knew would be carrying Fidelias's rogue Knights toward the fortress.
She felt it a moment later, a tension in the air that spoke of a coming stream of wind. Amara called Cirrus back and worked another sightcrafting, sweeping the sky, searching for the incoming troops.
She spotted them while they were still half a mile from the fortress, dark shapes against the morning sky. "There," she shouted. "They're coming in from the west. Half a minute at the most."
"All right," Bernard murmured.
Amara stepped out into the open, as the Knights Aeris with their transport litters swept down from the skies, diving for the fortress. A wedge of Knights Aeris flew before the litters, weapons ready, and the sun gleamed on the metal of their armor. They headed toward the gate in a steep dive.
"Ready!" Amara shouted, and drew her sword. "Ready!" She waited a pair of heartbeats more, until the enemy reached the valley-side wall and passed over the western courtyard then the garrison commander's building. She took a breath, willing her hands to stop shaking. "Loose!"
All around her in the courtyard, hummocks and lumps of scattered hay shook and shimmered, and a full fifty holder bowmen, covered with hand-fuls of hay and by the woodcrafting Bernard had worked over them, became
vaguely visible. As one, they lifted their great bows and opened fire directly up at the underside of the incoming Knights.
The holders' aim proved deadly, and their attack had taken the mercenaries completely by surprise. Knights Aeris in their armor cried out in sudden shock and pain, and men began to plummet from the skies like living hailstones. The archers stood their ground, shooting, even as the stunned mercenaries began to recover. One of the Knights Aeris who had not been hit began to weave the air into a shield of turbulence, and arrows began to abruptly veer and miss. Amara focused on the man and sent Cirrus toward his windstream. The Knight let out a cry of surprise and fell like a stone.
The second and third litters listed and began to spin out of control toward the ground, while injured and surprised bearers struggled to keep them from simply dropping. The first litter, though one of its bearers had taken an arrow through the thigh, made it through the withering cloud of arrow fire, though it had to veer to one side, and dropped onto the roof of one of the barracks on the opposite side of the courtyard.
Knights Aeris began to swoop and dive toward the courtyard, attacking, and though the holders' archery had done well when the Knights had not been prepared to face it, the air shortly became a howling cloud of shrieking furies, rendering the holders' arrows all but useless.