The pirate reached for another arrow, and I scrambled away, over the ridgepole and into the shelter of a bulky brick chimney. There I found myself staring right into the startled face of one of the reivers come to the call of the whistles. In the light of the flaming city I could see the reiver’s gold complexion, the bottle of incendiary fluid used to fire thatch, the quilted leather jacket, a hard leather cap with flaps tied down over the ears, and the curved bone-and-sinew bow in his hand.
I smashed the reiver in the face with a fist. I felt the impact jarring up to my shoulder, and the pirate went down in a tangle of limbs. The tiles clattered beneath me. I dropped onto the man, a knee planted on his midsection, and smashed my fist into the face yet again. I batted away the hands raised in defense and kept hammering at the face until the corsair lay still, face threaded with blood. I looked for a weapon and drew a short sword from the reiver’s waist. It was badly made, its surface pitted, its cross section a T to stiffen the badly forged steel.
Still, my spirit leapt as I held the cheap sword in my hand. At last I had some means of striking back.
And then I heard tiles rattle, and I turned to see the first archer, the one who had shot at me, crossing the ridgepole twenty feet away.
The reiver drew the bow, and I skipped away in mad flight over the rooftops. Arrows whistled through the air near my head. Behind me I could hear the band of survivors dying, baffled by packs of invaders as the red stag had been by Sir Stanley’s hounds.
Other archers saw me and fired, and I ran, carrying the useless sword, until I could see no more Aekoi silhouettes on the rooftops, and then I fell gasping to the tiles. I could hear no more fighting, no sounds of whistles, only the crackling of flame and the sigh of wind. Swirls of ash flew over me, and the smell of burning clogged my throat.
After a short, bleak eternity, I dragged myself to my feet again, sought the shelter of a chimney, and looked about me. In my flight from the archers I had taken no bearings, and now that I peered around a crow-stepped cornice, I found myself overlooking Scarcroft Square.
I ghosted forward to the cornice to get a better view, and peered through the ivy that massed over the building’s front. In the light of torches and burning buildings, I saw that the square had been filled with a vast mob of prisoners, all forced to sit or crawl by the reivers who stalked among them with swords and whips. The prisoners were all women and children, many only partly dressed, and they were in a continual, horrible, hobbling motion, as if the square were occupied by a flock of crippled lambs, none able to lie still, none permitted to rise. A constant sobbing and wailing hung in the air—no individual voice could be heard, but only the ululating rise and fall of a massed lament.
I realized where I was—atop the hall of the Honorable and Worshipfull Companie of Fullers, Scourers, and Stretchers, one of the wool guilds that flaunted its wealth and position on the square. Many was the time that my younger self had climbed its ivy-covered facade, pretending to be Sir Brigham of Hookton climbing the Tower of Doleful Visage, or Antinius leading the imperial storming party over the walls of the capital of the Felerine Republic, thus ending the Fifty Years’ War.
Antinius, I remembered, who was an Aekoi general, and who had led his men over the walls and into a sack, a sack such as the one I now witnessed. And yet Antinius had been a great hero, and the boy I had been wanted nothing so much as to emulate him.
For a brief, intense moment, I hated Antinius, all heroes, and my own younger self. By what right had I evaded death or capture? Because I was clever? Because a milkmaid had loved me?
If I were truly clever, I told myself, I would have saved my family.
I glanced around and saw the eastern sky already pale with the approaching dawn. The silhouettes of archers prowled the rooftops, and I knew they would be far too dangerous in full daylight. I needed to hide.
I did not particularly doubt my ability on that score. I knew the city far better than the reivers—there would be some alley, some courtyard, some alcove where I would escape notice.
And then I recalled a place only a few yards below my feet. The guild hall was covered in ivy, except for some niches with statues of celebrated patrons of the guild. Above the entrance was a portico with a pitched roof, and behind the pitched roof was a deep niche that had once held a statue of old King Emmius. But the ivy that draped the hall kept falling over the niche and obscuring the statue, and the obscurity was deemed an insult to royal dignity. The statue had been moved into the guild banqueting hall, where toasts could be offered in the good King’s memory; and the ivy was allowed to obscure the niche completely.
When I was a boy, the niche had seemed a great cavern, with the ivy leaves pouring over it like water over a weir. It was shadowed, private, and completely invisible, at least until the ivy turned yellow in the winter and began to die back.
And more important than anything else, it would give me a view of everything below. I still did not know the fate of my family, and if I saw any of them in the hands of the reivers, I would know to try to raise a ransom.
I peered far out over the cornice to make sure no one was looking in my direction, and saw no faces raised to view me. I rolled over the cornice and dropped down the front of the building. It was far easier to climb down the ivy than it had been to climb the courses of brick, and within a few seconds, I passed through the green curtain into the niche. There I gave way to exhaustion, dropped to the floor, and slumped against the wall, my useless sword dropping from my fingers; and as the cries and moans of the captives echoed in the small chamber, I slowly, one teardrop after another, let my hope slip away.
* * *
I did not sleep, but I fell into a kind of waking trance that had every quality of nightmare. I watched the Aekoi as they went about the business of sacking a city—and business it was, for all was aimed at generating profit for the attackers. Loot was brought in sacks or carts from all quarters of the city, and piled in the center of the square, around the fountain and its allegorical statues. The guild halls and town hall were pillaged for plate and other valuables—even King Emmius was carried off. None of the plunder was taken by individual reivers; it was all collected to be distributed later. One reiver who appeared laughing, dressed comically in a bolt of valuable silk, was viciously clouted by an officer and the silk taken away.
Weapons were taken to the New Castle, where the enemy commander had apparently established his headquarters. The pigs that roamed free on Ethlebight’s streets were killed and butchered, and the meat taken to the castle. Other food was also brought into the castle, and soon the scent of cooking wafted from the gates.
New groups of prisoners were harried into the square. All bedraggled, some wounded, they were kicked into place and then ignored. Punishment was savage if any protested, or if any so much as tried to stand. The prisoners were otherwise not molested—their captors were far too busy sucking the city dry of wealth.
The women and children were herded right before me on the west side of the square, and the men on the far eastern side, behind the piles of plunder, their position partly obscured by the half-built wooden theater. The men were all shackled, but only a few of the women had been chained. Perhaps the reivers had succeeded beyond their dreams and run out of fetters, or maybe they considered women less prone to rebellion if they had the lives of their children to consider.
My body was a mass of cramp and pain. I was desperately thirsty. My torn fingers oozed blood. Exhaustion reached rude, clammy hands into my mind and tore away everything but despair.
Harsh commands, barks of laughter, and crude jokes echoed up from the reivers. In the grammar school, I had been taught the classical Aekoi authors, all famed for their balanced, elegant rhetoric—I had learned nothing like the crudities that came from the square, that sounded little more than the yapping of terriers.