Stark said to Balin, “It would be better if you went now. Take the talisman, gather your men…”
Balm struck his fists down hard against the slates. “Not one man will leave Knshat without fighting for it.” He glared angrily at Stark, who shrugged.
“Their chance is coming.” He nodded to where press gangs were starting to beat the Quarter for men. “Let’s go and meet them, then.” He stood up and turned to Thanis. “You asked me last night to tell you how you could fight.” He took off the belt and fastened it around her body underneath her cloak. “Take this, and what food and blankets you can carry, but above all, this. Go and wait for us at the Festival Stones.”
She seemed about to defy him, and he told her gently, “You have the talisman. It’s up to you to see that it’s not taken.”
She stared at him, wide-eyed, and Balin said impatiently, “Will you stand all day?” He kissed her on the cheek and then pushed her bodily ahead of him off the roof and down the stairs. As they passed the door of the room he added, as though to make sure she understood, “And wait. Someone will come.”
He ran on past her, down the steps. Stark smiled and said, “Be careful.” He followed Balin. At the foot of the steps he glanced back and she was gone inside the room, taking with her Camar’s belt and the talisman. He felt light and free, as though he had been relieved of a heavy stone.
They joined a thickening flow of men who needed no urging from the press gangs to go and fight for their city. Balin ran beside Stark, and his face was so set and white around the lips that Stark said, “When you run the first one through and he screams, and you reflect upon your mutual humanness, remember that he came here of his own free and greedy will to kill you.”
Balin snarled at him. “Thanks, but I don’t expect to have that trouble.”
“Nevertheless,” said Stark, “you will.”
The weapons of the dead and wounded soldiers were heaped together in piles to supply the citizenry. Stark and Balin armed themselves and went up onto the Wall.
IX
It was a waste of time, and Stark knew it. He thought that probably a fair number of the men swarming up with them knew it too, and certainly for the thieves at least it would have been much easier simply to slip away out of Kushat and avoid the inevitable. But he was beginning to have considerable respect for the people of Kushat. To his simple way of thinking, a man who would not fight to defend what was his did not deserve to have it and would not have it for long. Some people, he knew, professed to find nobility in the doctrine of surrender. Maybe they did. To him it was only a matter of making a virtue out of cowardice.
At any rate, they fought, these men. Thief and weaver, butcher and blacksmith, stonemason and tavern-keeper, they fought. They were not very good at it, and the officers who ordered them this way and that along the Wall were not much better. The intermittent thunder of the rams still boomed from the gateway. The barbarian spearheads attacking the Wall began to play a game of shift, striking and then withdrawing to strike again in another place. “Playing with us,” Stark thought, and noticed that the supply of arrows seemed to be exhausted, as more and more of the defenders threw away their bows. He looked out at the black standard, where it waited on the plain.
And then the wait was over.
The mounted standard-bearer lifted the banner and rode with it to the forefront of the reserve force. The black-mailed form of Ciaran rode in its shadow. The pipers set up a thin wild crying, and the mass of men was suddenly in motion, coming down on Kushat like a thunderbolt.
Stark said to Balin, “Don’t wait too long, friend. Remember there is a second battle to be fought.”
“I know,” said Balin. “I know.” His face was agonized, watching the death of his city. He had not yet found occasion to flesh his blade.
The occasion came swiftly.
A ladder banged against the stones only a few feet away. Men came leaping up the rungs, fierce-eyed clansmen out to avenge their fallen brothers and wipe out the defeat they had suffered that morning. Stark was at the ladderhead to greet them, with a spear. He spitted two men through with it and lost it as the second one fell with the point jammed in his breastbone. A third man came over the parapet. Stark received him into his arms.
Balin stood frozen, his borrowed sword half raised. He saw Stark hurl the warrior bodily off the Wall and heard the cry as he fell, and he saw Stark’s face as he grasped the ladder and shoved it outward. There were more screams. Then there were more ladders and more red-haired men, and Stark had found a sword and was using it. Balin smelled the blood, and suddenly he was shaken with the immediacy of it, the physical closeness of an enemy come to slaughter him and destroy everything he loved. A fever burned through him. He moved forward and began to chop at the heads that appeared over the Wall. But it was as Stark had said, and at first he found that it was easier if he did not look too closely into their faces. Because of this one of them got under his uncertain guard and almost gutted him. After that he had no more difficulty.
Things had become so hot and confused now that the officers had lost control and men fought wherever they wished and could. And there was fighting in plenty for all, but it did not last long. The barbarians gained the Wall in three places, lost it in two and then regained it in one, and from these two footholds they spread inward along the ledges, rolling up the defenders, driving them back, driving them down. The fighting spread to the streets, and now all at once the ways leading back into the city were clogged with screaming women and children. Stark lost sight of Balin. He hoped that he was still alive and sensible enough to get away, but however it might be he was on his own and there was nothing Stark could do about it. So he forgot it and began to think of other things.
The great gate still held against the booming rams. Stark forced his way through to the square. The booths of the hucksters were overthrown, the wine-jars broken and the red wine spilled. Tethered beasts squealed and stamped, tired of their chafing harness and driven wild by the shouting and the smell of blood. The dead were heaped high where they had fallen from above. The last of the defense was here, soldiers and citizens forming a hollow square more or less by instinct, trying to guard their threatened flanks and their front, which was the gate, all at the same time. The deep thunder of the rams shook the very stones under them. The iron-sheathed timbers of the gate gave back an answering scream, and toward the end all other sounds grew hushed. The nobles had come down off the Wall. They mounted and sat waiting.
There were fewer of them now. Their bright armor was dented and stained, and their faces had a pallor on them. Still they held themselves erect and arranged their garments and saw that the blazons on their shields were clean of blood. Stark saw Rogain. His scholar’s hands were soft, but they did not tremble.
There was one last hammer-stroke of the rams. With a bitter shriek the weakened bolts tore out and the great gate was broken through.
The nobles of Kushat made their first, and final, charge.
As soldiers they went up against the riders of Mekh, and as soldiers they held them until they were cut down. The few who survived were borne back into the square like pebbles on the forefront of an avalanche. And first through the gates came the winged battle-mask of the Lord Ciaran.
There were many beasts tied among the ruined stalls with no riders to claim them. Stark mounted the nearest one and cut it free. Where the press was thickest, there was the man in black armor, riding like a god, and the sable axe drank life wherever it hewed. Stark’s eyes shone with a strange cold light. The talisman was gone, the fate of Kushat was nothing to him. He was a free man. He struck his heels hard into the scaly flanks and the beast plunged forward.