“He’s a careful one, this new Lord Marshal,” the caravan master said, eating his bowl of beans and salt by the fire. He sounded approving, and Clara felt a stab of pride.
“I don’t understand,” a young Dartinae woman said. She was a seamstress who sometimes also shared a bed with the soldiers. Her name was Mita or Meta. Something like that. “He could have used those buildings as cover. Gotten in right by the wall. Now he can’t attack until the fire’s burned out, and even then, he’ll be marching over embers to get there.”
“That was never cover,” the caravan master said. “That was the first line of defense. Straight trap, and meant to seduce him. March his men in under it to keep the arrows off, just like you were thinking. Only then it’d be the queensmen who started the fire and our boys burning in it. Kalliam’s boy’s too smart to take the easy path. Don’t know how he’s getting past that wall, though.”
When the time came to bed down for the night, the ’van master took her and Vincen aside. “Look, I can’t help but notice you two like setting up a ways off from the rest of us. That’s fine. I got no opinion on it. But tonight? Might be best if you kept close. Soldiers before a battle can be… well, rowdy, eh? Mistakes get made. Better all around if we keep close and cheer them on.”
The smoke thickened the air, and the flames of the city danced and leaped and muttered. When she woke on the grey, ashen morning, her eyes stung and her throat felt raw. Where the day before there had been houses and businesses, stables and dyers’ yards, there was now smoking ash, blackened timber, a few low stone walls. And beyond it, the great wall of Porte Oliva, blackened with soot. It looked like a city already fallen. Jorey’s scouts made forays into the grey and black and red, reporting back, Clara assumed, how much the coals still burned, how hard or simple it would be to cross the new-made ruins and spill the same destruction on the far side of the wall.
“Are you all right?” Vincen asked.
Clara nodded at the defensive wall. “It’s a high wall, and it seems they know what the priests are capable of. Do you think it might hold?”
“What I’ve heard, Porte Oliva’s never fallen to attack,” Vincen said.
“I can believe that,” Clara said.
Near midday, the worst of the fire seemed to have passed. All around them, the soldiers began to prepare. Siege engines were assembled—trebuchet and catapult, ballista and the strange new spear throwers that had passed them on the road. A vast array of mechanisms all built toward violence.
And then, as they began to rise, the voices.
“The goddess is with you. You cannot fail.” It wasn’t Vicarian’s voice, but neither did it carry the accents of the Keshet. When the priest passed by, one hand lifted to the sky and the other holding a speaking trumpet, his face strong and bright and severe, she didn’t recognize him, but he did not have the wiry hair and long face of Basrahip or the others like him. This man had been born in the same Antea that she had known, and had been remade. “Her strength is yours. Her purity is yours. The servants of lies tremble before you now, and you cannot fail.”
“Why is he saying that?” Vincen asked.
“To give them courage,” Clara said. “To assure them that they will win.”
“That they… Oh. I understand.”
In the background, a group of nearby soldiers took up the chant cannot fail, cannot fail, cannot fail. Clara turned to Vincen. He looked older in the smoke-stained light. “What did you think it meant?”
“I was taking it more that they dared not fail. Must not. You cannot fail, for if you do the consequences will be unimaginably dire. Something like that.”
“Yes,” Clara said. “Words can so often mean what you take from them rather than what was intended.”
They sat huddled by the ’van master’s cart. The chant seemed to spread around them, the men of the army—men who had been farmers and tradesmen two years before and were practiced killers now—lifting bared steel and shouting as if their words alone could bring down the city’s defenses. Cannot fail, cannot fail, cannot fail. She could hear both meanings in the words now. It occurred to her that if things went poorly, Jorey and Vicarian might both die today. Two of her sons might not see the sunset. She might not. It was a battle, and anything might happen.
Worse, when the priest walked by again, the speaking horn to his lips, his face a mask of religious ecstasy, Clara found herself wanting to take comfort in his words and slogans. You are the chosen of the goddess. She will protect you. She wanted to give herself over to the hope that it might be true, that Jorey was blessed and special and that he, at least, would live to see his wife and baby.
She didn’t know she was weeping until Vincen took her hand. He didn’t speak, but his gaze met her, and she found herself taking some strength from his simple presence.
A roar went up. A thousand voices lifted together. The first of the siege engines had loosed its stone. Clara watched it arc up over the newly made wasteland and strike the wall. The sound of the impact came with the stone already falling to the ground, and four more catapults swung. Four more stones battered at the vast and uncaring walls of Porte Oliva. For hours, Jorey’s forces flung stones, trying to crack the battlements and the great gate. Many of the shots fell against the wall’s face, but some few scraped across the top or fell past it into the city to effects Clara could not guess.
She heard the horns sound, the orders called out, but she couldn’t make out the words. Men streamed forward around her and the rest of the caravan. Thin, hard-faced men in motley armor and beards. Her countrymen. The servants of the Severed Throne, as much as was she, rushing to spend their deaths to avenge Geder Palliako’s sexual humiliation. And Jorey at their head. The ranks formed in the ashes. The catapults threw their last rounds before the advance. Six siege towers began the slow approach through the ruins, each following a trail the scouts had marked out for them. They were like slow giants, lumbering forward, the forces of the army advancing behind them, using them as cover. For now, the defense from the wall began in earnest. Great bolts from ballistas arcing over the ashy land. And in the siege towers, answering bolts, and also, more terribly, the voices of the priests, shouting their dreadful certainties. From where she sat, they were only muddled echoes that bounced from the wounded side of the wall. She wondered what the defenders of the city heard and if they believed. And if they did, how would they react? She closed her eyes, back again in another battle, Dawson at her side, as Basrahip shouted to a square that they had already lost, that everything they loved was gone, that there was no hope. There was no hope here. No victory was possible. Geder’s priests would win or else Jorey would lose, and there was no ending that would not pour acid on her heart.
“Ah, Vincen,” she said.
His gentle grip on her hand tightened and did not let go.
On the field, a covered battering ram rolled toward the gates, arrows and stones raining down onto it. Two of the siege towers had become fouled in the debris of the burned city, and men were scampering out in front, pulling away blackened beams and stones. Smoke rose where the passage of the army had exposed coals still hot from the night’s long fire. The air all around her stank of ashes. The first of the siege towers came to the wall, throwing ladders up to reach the last distance to the wall’s top. The queensmen of Porte Oliva swarmed toward it, their little swords no bigger than needles at this distance. The battle along the crest of the wall began. Far away to the south, a column of black smoke was rising until it found some barrier of air and grew flat along the top. She couldn’t imagine what it came from, but it added to the sense of doom that covered the battlefield. The image of humanity locked in violence forever, without hope of peace.