“Better that,” Huutsuu replied, “than to sit a hundred paces distant, to hide behind machines, to risk nothing while the enemy dies. This is not war; it is killing.”
“As though the Urghul have respect for human life. I’ve been among your people, Huutsuu. I’ve seen what you do.”
She raised her brows. Valyn studied her; he had not had the opportunity to watch a human face, to really see one for so long. “And what is it, Malkeenian, that you have seen?”
“The men and women you’ve murdered, torn apart. The blood.”
“And you,” she pressed, cocking her head to one side, “have not done this? You have not spilled blood?”
“Of course I have,” he said. The memory of the day’s fighting coursed through his mind, the perfect clarity of it, the life burning in his veins as he raised the ax and brought it down. “That doesn’t make it right.”
“There is a sacred way of war,” Huutsuu said, “and a profane. I turned against my people, turned against the leach, because there is no struggle in the blood he spills. Like your generals with their engines, he risks nothing with his slaughter.” She raised an eyebrow. “Is this not the way you were raised? The way you were trained?”
“It’s what makes sense,” Valyn ground out. “War’s plenty dangerous even without the idiotic stunts.”
The Urghul woman shook her head. “Your way of war is a pale, ugly thing. A perversion. You call yourselves civilized, and yet look at the things you fight for: borders, power, wealth…”
“As opposed to what?”
“As opposed to nothing. The war itself is worship.”
“A sick sort of worship.”
“Sicker than killing a woman because she stepped across an invisible line you have drawn across the dirt? Sicker than burning a man because he took some gem, some brick of gold, from another man?”
“Justice,” Valyn said. The word felt brittle as a dead bird’s bone. “The law…”
Huutsuu waved his objection away. “There is only the struggle. You know this, Malkeenian. You have seen it, lived it. Forget your justice and your law; what is real is the struggle between person and person. The struggle that takes place inside a bloody heart.” Her smile was sharp as an ax’s edge. “This is why you can see, Malkeenian. You may deny this truth, but you have understood its sanctity.”
And so the Urghul did not scheme or build siege engines. For four days they came at the wall, bathed it in their screams and their blood, and for four days the wall held. The Flea’s orders to Valyn, Newt, and Sigrid were simple: Go where the shit’s worst. When the men start to break, don’t let them.
It seemed like a ludicrous command, so reductive it was almost glib. As the battle raged on, however, as the Urghul threw themselves howling at the wall over and over and over, Valyn started to see the wisdom in it. The Kettral spent years studying tactics back on the Islands, poring over hundreds of battles from dozens of wars, learning the intricate dance of advance and retreat. Victory, those lessons seemed to say, was something hammered out in a general’s head, a matter of maps and strategies.
Not here.
Atop the wall, any attempt at convoluted tactics could only obscure a series of simple, brutal truths: the wall was all that stood between the Urghul and the south. If the wall fell, the Urghul won. The wall could not fall.
“Go where the shit’s worst,” Valyn muttered to himself on the morning of the first day, chopped his way through two Urghul who had managed to get their feet beneath them. He buried an ax in the first, shoved the body into the second, then smashed them both back over the wall with his second ax.
Go where the shit’s worst. When the men start to break, don’t let them.
The first half of the orders were easy. The second, less so. All Valyn’s training had been in small-team tactics, teams built of meticulously trained specialists. He had no doubt that the legionaries beside him on the wall were excellent at marching, at holding a formation, at stabbing with their spears and hacking over and over with their swords, but they were hardly Kettral. Valyn could smell the terror on them, ranker and thicker each time the Urghul came. Each time the riders attacked, a few more gained the walkway. Three or four, the men could throw back. More than that, and there would be panic.
All that first morning, Valyn searched in vain for something to say to the soldiers, a few words that might make a crucial difference. The history books were filled with noble exhortations from commanders, but Valyn had no exhortations. He’d told the truth when the legionaries first arrived: they were dead men, all of them-either that day, or the next, or the one following. There was no escaping the Urghul army, no way to hold the wall forever. Sooner or later, the riders would break through, and then Ananshael would wade among them, unmaking men and women alike, his fingers, terribly nimble, unbinding the tangled knots that were their lives.
The best that Valyn could do was to keep the men grounded in the fight. Rather than giving them time to think about what had to happen in an hour or a day, Valyn hurled the brute fact of the battle over and over again in their faces. Midway through the day, while the sun burned through the clouds overhead, Brynt took an arrow to the shoulder. It wasn’t a killing wound, at least not right away, but it would have hurt, and the man collapsed to the battlements, pale face even more blanched with the pain.
Valyn had knelt beside the soldier for a moment, exploring the wound. Then he took the arrow in both hands, broke it off, slapped the man when he began to faint, then dragged the jagged shaft through the wound.
Brynt screamed. Blood flowed, hot and quick. The legionaries near them turned to stare, eyes wide, fear boiling off them. Brynt was a distraction, that was clear enough, and there was no room for a distraction. With a curse, Valyn hauled the man back to his feet, stabbed a finger at the mass of horsemen as they wheeled.
“There,” Valyn bellowed, choosing one of the Urghul archers at random, a woman with fire-gold hair streaming out behind her. “Kill her. She’s the one who shot you, so fucking kill her.”
For a moment, he thought the young soldier was too lost in his pain and panic to understand. Then Brynt pulled free of his grip. He wobbled for a moment, leaning against the ramparts, then steadied himself, raising his spear with his good arm. When the woman galloped within range, he bellowed and let the shaft fly. It lagged her slightly, burying itself in the horse’s flank, but that was good enough. The poor beast bellowed, buckled, and went down, throwing the woman, then crushing her. Brynt didn’t have his spear anymore, but each wave of Urghul brought fresh weapons, and more importantly, Brynt was standing again, shouting, ignoring the blood on his shoulder, bellowing taunts at the riders below. And just like that, the men around him, soldiers close to buckling moments before, were yelling too.
They made it through the afternoon that way, and another day, and another, Valyn choosing targets, the men focusing their fear and rage on one particular face, fighting a single foe at a time. Valyn lost himself so thoroughly in the battle, in the rhythm of attack, hold, and regroup, that when twilight finally crept into the sky on that fourth day, he almost didn’t notice. One moment the Urghul were hurling themselves at the wall, dying by the dozen, and the next they were pulling back. The thunder of hooves, the clash of steel against stone, the thousand-voiced chorus of battle-it was gone, replaced by the whimpers and sobs of the dying, the breathless, desperate gasps of those left alive atop the wall.