"I am traveling west from here," said Mars. His voice was one that Draffut had not heard before, all drums and trumpets and clashing metal. "War draws me there. I see a beseiged castle, and one in the attacking army who offers me sacrifice with skilful magic. I think it is time for me to answer the prayers of one of my devoted worshippers."
From the group behind the speaker there came a discordant chorus of varied comments on this announcement. Draffut noted that they ranged from applause to enthusiastic scorn.
Mars ignored them all. He did not turn his terrible gaze from Draffut, who stood right in his way. Mars said: "I am going to that castle, there to spend some time in killing humans for amusement."
Draffut said simply: "No, that you will not do."
At this point someone in the rear rank of the gods threw a burning boulder straight at Draffut. It seemed to come with awesome slowness through the air, and it was accurately aimed. Catching it strained his great strength, but from some reserve he drew the power to hurl it back — not at its unseen thrower. Instead Draffut aimed it straight for Mars, just as the long spear leveled for a throw. Rock and spear met in mid-air, to explode in a million screaming fragments.
Another spear already in his hand, the God of War strode forward to do battle.
Chapter 18
Dame Yoldi herself had told Mark several times that she considered his survival vitally important, and that she meant for that reason to keep him in comparative safety at her side as much as possible when the fighting started. Thus it happened that they were together on the high roof of Sir Andrew's castle, in early morning light, when the first attack of the Gray Horde broke like a dirty wave against the walls.
The defenders were as ready as they could be for the assault, for there had been no way for the attackers to achieve surprise. On the previous day, Sir Andrew's enchantress had announced that the speed and direction of the larvae's advance could be only approximately controlled by the magicians of Yambu. For the past few days, Yoldi and several of her assistants had attempted to interfere with the enemy magic, and turn the larvae against those who had raised them. But that effort had failed, and Dame Yoldi was necessarily concentrating upon other matters now. She said that in any case the larvae would not be able to remain active for more than a few days. Once raised from the swamp, they drew no nourishment, no energy of any kind, from their environment. This made them difficult to interfere with, and almost impossible to poison, but also awkward for their masters to control. However, for the few days that their pseudo-life endured they were an almost invincible army, immune to weariness and fear.
Their massed howling, like distant wind, could be heard in the castle for more than an hour before their first charge at the walls. Therefore the defenders were alerted and in place when the hundred scaling ladders of the Horde were raised.
As the light grew full, Mark could see from his high vantage point how Ben was taking part in the fighting atop the eastern wall, using his great strength behind a pole to topple scaling ladders back as fast as the handless, clumsy larvae below could prop them up; there were no humans to be seen at all in the first wave of attackers.
And Barbara was on the wall west of the guard towers and the main gate, one of a company of men and women armed with bows and slings. Their missiles went hailing thickly down into the sea of the attackers, but Mark could not see that they did much damage. An arrow might penetrate a larva's shell, but the thing kept advancing anyway, pushing up another ladder and then climbing to the attack. A slung stone might crack a carapace, but the hit figure came on anyway, until a leg joint was broken too badly to let it walk, or its arms disabled to the point where it could no longer climb a ladder.
The hundred ladders carried forward to the walls in that first attack, Mark decided, must have been made for the larvae by their human masters and allies. Last night he had heard Nestor talking in the castle, describing in detail what he had seen of the larvae at close range, and what kind of fighting might be expected when their horde swept to the assault on the castle walls.
Sir Andrew had listened very carefully to the same account. The knight had then sat alone for a while, the picture of grim thought, and then had issued orders, disposing of his defense forces as best he might. Mark had got the impression, listening, that all the experts on hand knew that the walls were going to be undermanned.
Then Sir Andrew had had Nestor speak to the defenders also of Draffut, of how the Lord of Beasts had seemed to favor their cause, and to hint of active intervention on their side. This raised the hopes of everyone somewhat, though Nestor was careful not to claim that any such promise had been made by Draffut.
Nestor, as he had explained to a smaller gathering of his old companions of the wagon, had decided he had no real choice but to take part in the fighting, once he had decided to come to Sir Andrew's castle with the sword.
"Besides, where would I have gone to get away? From here all roads lead ultimately to Fraktin or Yambu, except those that go back into the swamp, or to the northwest; and I expect that even those are closed by now. "
Armed with the Sword of Fury, and wearing the best armor that Sir Andrew had been able to fit him with at short notice, Nestor was somewhere in one of the central guard-towers when the first attack began. The strategy was for him to wait there until close combat provided a suitable chance to bring the sword's powers into use. But though the sword whined restlessly when the attack began, and drew its threads of vapor from the air into itself, that chance did not come with the first assault.
Not that there was much of a break between the first and second. The Gray Horde did not retreat from the foot of the walls to reform, as a human army would certainly have done. Instead its thousands milled around, indifferent to slung stone and arrow.
And then surged forward behind the ladders once again.
By now it had been discovered that large stones dropped on the attacking larvae below the walls were somewhat more effective than slings and arrows, but that fire was disappointingly inefficient. The deadwood figures were not really dry, and they would have to be burnt into ashes to be stopped.
"A breach! A breach!"
Mark heard the cry go up some minutes after the second surge with ladders against the walls began. Looking down at the top of the west wall, to his right, he saw that gray mannikins were on it, their arms windmilling as they fought.
"The sword comes!"
"Townsaver!"
Through the defenders' thin reserves the figure of Nestor, recognizable in his new armor, was moving into action. Above and through the banshee-howling of the enemy sounded the high shriek of the blade. The sound called up for Mark his last day in his home village, and he felt a surge of sickness.
The hand of Dame Yoldi pressed his arm. "It comes awake, and timely too. We have a holding here, and unarmed folk in it to be defended. The gods cannot be wholly evil, to have forged a weapon of this nature."
Mark could not think beyond that screaming sound. Nestor had reached the foe now, and the blade in his hands blurred back and forth, faster than sight could follow it, and the first gray rank went down.
This was Duke Fraktin's first chance to hear Townsaver scream, and he was greatly interested. He watched from a distance as the small blur in one man's hands cleared the west wall of larvae. The Duke was impressed, but not particularly surprised.
He watched also, with fascination, how gracefully and angrily Queen Yambu rode her prancing warbeast in front of her own ranked army of human men, even as he himself paced near the center of his own. The bulk of the Duke's forces were now disposed in a semicircular formation, with its right wing on the lake almost behind the castle, left wing anchored just about where the winding road came up the hill to find Sir Andrew's fortified main gate. Upon that gate a hundred larvae were now battering with a ram fashioned from the trunk of a huge tree. Their feet slipped and slid in mud that had been their predecessors' bodies, while stones and fire decimated their ranks from above. Meanwhile, along the road, rough battalions of replacements jostled forward, howling dully, ready without fear or hope to take their turn beneath the walls.