Forty yards from the main gate sat a wagon-mounted ram blazing merrily, while the slope roundabout the front and the west side of the hall was randomly littered with discarded shields, weapons, scaling ladders, and some twoscore arrowquilled bodies, very few of these within fifty yards of their objective. And Bili breathed a sigh of relief. At least the initial assault had been rebuffed . . . bloodily rebuffed.
Just beyond bowshot of the walls and towers, mounted nobles were slowly and painfully reforming their heterogeneous mob for a second attack. That it was a difficult job was attested by the shouted obscenities, screams of profane rage, and the thwacks of ridingwhips and sword flats which were clearly audible to the watchers.
The rebels were an army in name only. They had just seen friends and neighbors and relatives suffer or die on the now gory path to those forbidding walls, and their priests and officers had yet to convince them that another sally against those bristling fortifications would result in aught save ever more wounds and deaths. Those who had for so long secretly drilled them and taught them weapons usage, they now felt, had unjustly kept from them the hard facts of warfare-the utter exhaustion and dry-mouthed terror which so weighted a man’s limbs when he saw of what horrors arrows and darts and catapult stones were capable.
Thick black smoke roiled up from within the walls and the lowing of cattle could be plainly heard, along with the creaking of ropes and groaning of timbers as a catapult was wound and set. After a brief pause, there was a wheee-WHUNNK and a headsized blob of burning pitch traced a high, smoketrailing parabola across the darken-ing sky, to fall squarely into the milling midst of the rebel ‘formation’! It was all that the priests and nobles could then do to prevent an outright rout. Wisely, they elected to form several hundred yards farther away.
Bili, Hwahltuh, Gil, and one of the Freefighters slid down from their observation point at the brushy summit of a hill. The Sanderz snorted his disgust at the quality of the men opposing them.
“Kinsman Bili, a stand of prairiegrass would slow us more than cowards like those. Let us ride through them now.”
But Bili shook his shaven head. “No, we are too many to just ride up to the walls, especially since it is now almost dark. My clansmen and Freefighters are expecting no more than seven riders. When they spied a party of this size, they surely would bring us under their bows. We must find a way to let them know that we are friends. Are any of your clansmen far-speakers, by chance?”
“Ask anything but that, Kinsman,” groaned Hwahltuh. “I heard that that talent is common amongst the folk of some clans, but our last far-speaker went to Wind when I was yet a lad. Whitetip can farspeak, to a limited extent, but only, alas, if he knows the mind to which he is to beam.”
Gil spoke up. “If there are mindspeakers in the stone-lodge, why not wait until full dark and let a Cat-brother go close enough to range them?”
Atop the front wall, amidst the archers and catapult crews, old Komees Djeen limped stiffly up and down, snapping and snarling at all and sundry out of his worry over the fate of Thoheeks Bili. The wagons were long since returned before even the van of the rebel host had appeared. Since Vaskos was the last man to have clapped eyes on Bili, he had suffered questioning and requestioning by the retired Strahteegos, until at length the Keeleeohstos-grumpy anyway at being bedridden by order of Master Ahlee-had bluntly inquired as to which his questioner was actually losing, his hearing or his memory. And the Lady Ahnah and Komees Hari had had to be fetched, ere the shouting and insults were done, to persuade the two officers to keep their steel cased!
His threequarter armor clanking, the grizzled nobleman stalked up to a group of fledgling engineers being put through a crash course in catapult service. “You!” he barked at a tall Freefighter who was lowering a fifty-pound stone into the basket. “Don’t you know better than to wear a crested helm when you’re serving an engine? If the lip of that basket hooks that crest, it’ll take the empty head off your shoulders. I’ve seen it happen, soldier!”