Jo Clayton: Changer’s Moon

“You said it, Dom. The wall holding them.”

“Right. But we’ve got a problem. The walking towers.” Anoike crossed her arms, wrinkled her nose. “Thought that why you got us up here. How long?”

“Sundown.”

“Hunh.” She poked her elbow into Georgia’s ribs. “Maybe you ready now to use those rockets.” Her hazel eyes filled with laughter, she turned back to Hern. “He a skrinch with them. I keep telling him Kole the thing holds them out there together. Pull him and they fall apart. But he sitting on those rockets like a broody hen on a clutch of eggs.”

Georgia shook his head. “He keeps that Nor too close. I figure we got one good shot with the rockets; if we try for him and that Nor shifts them aside, then we’ve lost the chance to finesse some advantage from the others we got. Those towers, they’re different. Take them out and have a hot try for Kole. We miss him this time, no sweat, we get the towers and maybe some more norits.”

Yael-mri cleared her throat; when they looked at her, she said, “He’s right. The Nor with Kole and three more out there are only a hair away from the challenge duels that could lift several of them into full power. Take no chances with that Four.”

Hern rubbed at the back of his neck, feeling tired. He’d been tired for days. Sitting up here, separated from his fighters, chained to the binoculars and the teletalk, directing the battles like some botso master moving his pieces about a board. Watching men and women die when they rushed to follow his orders. He was angry, frustrated, tired, occasionally despairing. He missed Serroi terribly; more than once he was tempted to send for her just to talk a little, to get away from the unending strain, to touch again the warmth between them and feel human again, but he didn’t give in to that need. Her presence down there meant lives saved and he needed those lives. There were times, especially late at night, when he was stretched out on the pallet in the corner, a meie at the window charged to wake him if she spotted any movement below, there were times when he felt like walking down the stairs and away from the wall, away from the fighting and the responsibilities oppressing him, but he knew also he was the one person who could order events without getting an argument or mutiny from every part of his motley force. He was as locked-in here as Serroi was with her healing. At his lowest moments he wondered if he would ever escape, if the mijloc would claim him for the last part of his life as it had for the first. No, he told himself. No. But he could feel them all leaning on him, depending on him, everyone behind the wall and out in the desolation Floarin had made of the Plain. And the exiles who were fighting so powerfully for him, they’d need him too, he was the only one who could see that they got the land and help he’d promised them. He couldn’t walk away, that much of his father he had in him. Heslin, he said to himself in the dark-and it was both a groan and a curse.

He poured more water and drank, turned to Georgia. “Can you move your launchers into place without alerting the traxim?”

Georgia frowned. “They’re not that big. Have to be some work on them, takes a few minutes to sight them in on the towers.”

Anoike touched his arm. “The little pults the meien been using, they worth shit so far, but Kole he got to be expecting the Dom here to try anything he can. Make a lot of fuss getting them moved, I expecting Kole he don’t notice us here and there fussin with the launchers.”

Hern clicked his fingers against the glass, then nodded. “That should do it.”

Yael-mri sighed. “There’s more bad news, Dom. My sensitives say there are Sleykynin in the valley.”

“I thought you’d blocked that.”

“Apparently bands on both sides of the valley have been working round through the mountains toward the southern narrows. The ones we killed peeled off the main parties, testing us, I think. As far as I can tell, they came down beyond the sensitives’ reach and have been creeping toward us the past two days.” She sighed. “I hate to ask it, dom Hern, but I need hunting parties and guard shifts. I know we don’t have the fighters. I know everyone’s needed on the wall, but how much good will holding the wall do if the Sleykynin break the Shawar? How long would the wall stand then?” She looked at her hands again. When she spoke it was in a whisper as if she feared to hear what she was saying. “How much good even those will do, I don’t know. I just don’t know. Sleykynin are old hands at games we meien have never played.

The launchers were slipped onto the wall in the midst of the contrived confusion Anoike had suggested. The three launchers they had were trained upon the three towers, the rockets nested in them. Overhead the traxim whirled about, thick black flocks of demon spies, but they took no special notice of three small knots of purpose in the larger flow. In the tower Hern scanned the army; it was late afternoon, a heavily overcast day that spread a cold gray gloom over the plain outside the wall and the foothills beyond. He could find no trace of Nekaz Kole, but did locate his tent, its fine waterproof silk walls lit from within by lamps and perhaps a charcoal brazier to keep the army’s master warm. He murmured into the teletalk, reporting his observations to Anoike, adding that he saw no point in waiting longer. He flicked to the second channel, glanced down at the scale etched into the stone of the slit, spoke again. “Kole’s tent. Ten degrees west of second tower, estimate this point. Comment?” He listened. “Right. Ready. On three. One. Two. Three.”

Diminishing hiss, exhaust clouds glowing in gray light. Rockets whispering from the launchers, exploding with no appreciable interval between launch and hit, so close are the towers, three blasts that open out the gloom with sound and glare. The exiles handling the launchers muscle them around, change their aim and shoot off a second flight about two heartbeats after the first.

Hern grunted with satisfaction as the towers flew into splinters, shifted his gaze to the tents as the next flight converged on them and struck, throwing fire, dirt and stone in a wide circle about the place where the tents had been, the stone and shards from the rocket casing slicing like knives through the surrounding Ogogehians, sending even those hardened mercenaries into a panic flight. He lifted the teletalk, spoke into it. “Go. Get whatever you can.”

More of the rockets streaked out, their flights diverging from the center. Though Sankoise and Ogogehian and Majilarni fled the terrible things that flew at them with paralyzing swiftness and slew by hundreds, not one by one, only the lucky survived. The first flight hit among the Sankoise, slaying many, wounding more. The second sprayed through the orderly camps of the mercenaries, but the third flight veered suddenly upward, curled to the east and exploded some minutes later among the mountain tops, almost too far off to see or hear. Hern cursed fervently, spoke again into the teletalk. “Shut down. No use wasting more of those. That should hold them a while.”

Nekaz Kole wasn’t in his tent, but sitting at a shaman’s fire in a Majilarni shaman’s hutch dealing with a potential rebellion. The Majilarni were tired of this interminable siege that was getting them killed without any of the usual pleasures of war. Other times they could hear the moans of the wounded and the dying, could see the city behind the wall begin to suffer, other times they could race their rambuts around the walls and yell mocking things at the defenders, boast what they’d do to them when the city fell, howl with laughter at their stupidity when they tried sending out embassies to cut deals with the shaman and the elders, other times they could play with sorties and smugglers and savor the growing desperation behind the walls. Other times they could ride off more or less when they chose, loaded down with loot and slaves when the city finally capitulated. They could see no profit in this business. The wall was too thick, too high, too long; the defenders were too deadly with their shafts and those tiny pellets that dug right through you and maybe wounded your mount too, that sought you out impossibly far from the wall. That wasn’t fair. You died and you didn’t even get to call your curses on your killer because she was too far to hear you. And that was another thing. They were fighting women. Oh, they’d seen some men’s faces now and then, but they knew what this place was: it was where they trained those abominations that played at being men. How could a man gain honor fighting women? The Majilarni fighters were turning ugly. The shaman was getting nervous. Clans had turned on their shamans before. If he was negligent about bringing them to game and graze, or milking water into dry wells, or if he got them beaten too badly in contests with enemy clans, if he led them to defeat before the walled cities too often, then the shaman got roasted over a slow fire, fed to the herd chini and his apprentice set in his place. That is, if the apprentice stuck around long enough to get caught, in which case he wasn’t much of a shaman, and would soon follow his master into chinin bellies. The shaman squatting across the fire from Nekaz Kole knew the smell of revolt; he cursed the day he’d let ambition trap him into this business. Though he feared the Nearga nor, he was on the point of leading his folk away, to take them on raids up through the mijloc and across Assurtilas in hopes that loot and proper fighting would put them into a better mood.