S. Stirling - The Given Sacrifice

Whung-whap!

The catapults spoke one after another, the wheels coming up a little and then thumping down again. Long bowshot to the west top of the barricade fountained up in a shower of burlap and fragments of root vegetable. . and men. They waited while the throwing-machines worked their way along the parapet, knocking it down into a slumped chaos in a steady rhythm of one shot every four seconds, and then the bowmen trotted forward.

“Let the gray geese fly!” Edain barked. “Wholly together- shoot! ”

A hundred bows snapped, and the arrows sleeted down. For once, Rudi felt little of the grim urgency of impending battle, only a smoldering anger at the necessity of it.

I’ve done this too often for too long, he thought. I’m. . not quite bored with it, but nearly. It’s time to finish it. This isn’t the climax of my life, it’s something I have to get out of the way before I get on with my life.

One thing the bards usually didn’t talk about was the essential sameness of battle; there was more variety to farming. He judged, knocked down his visor, glared through the vision slit at a world like a bright distant painting. .

“Morrigú!” he shouted, and charged.

“ Ho la , Odhinn!” Bjarni roared.

“Haro, Portland! Holy Mary for Portland!” Mathilda shrieked, not a step behind.

“Haakaa päälle!”

“Artos and Montival!”

The catapults and the longbowmen kept shooting as long as they could-beside Rudi a knight swore and ducked as a cloth-yard shaft zipped by and clipped the last ostrich plume from the rather ragged assembly on his helmet. The Bearkiller artillerists had all the self-confidence that common wisdom said their folk showed-some called it arrogance-and the last ball thumped home in the tumbled arrow-studded sacks when the front rank of the Montivallans was only thirty yards from their goal.

It was good to keep the enemy’s heads down; bad to have yours smacked right off your shoulders by a six-pounder ball fired from behind you. That last one left a Boisean white-faced and sweating as it went overhead so fast that it was a mere blurred streak and so close that the wind of its passage made him stagger. Then Frederick Thurston’s men threw their heavy javelins and drew their short swords.

The surviving Cutters popped up again, but they had time for only one volley of arrows from their powerful horn-backed bows as the Montivallans stormed up the obstacle in a roaring wave of shields and blades. One whistled by Rudi, another went thwack into his shield with a hard sound and a feeling like a blow from a club. The High King sprang up the remains of the barricade, agile as a great hunting tiger in the sixty pounds of steel despite the shifting footing. A shete tried to stop the Sword of the Lady, and the tough spring steel was shorn straight through. The man beneath spun away clutching at his severed throat. .

When he fought with his own hands, there was a. . going away, since the Sword came, a madness that was completely lucid. Black wings bore him up, amid a storm of buffetings. More of the guardsmen crowded ahead as the fight tumbled down the inner side of the barricade. Their shields came up to protect the monarchs and Rudi shoved his visor up again as he came back to himself and stood on a sack to give himself a better view. Across the square a snarling scrimmage of fighting at the entrance to an avenue broke apart, and a walking wall of leveled pike-points came through, marching to a hammer of drums and a wordless chant of ha -ba-da, ha -ba-da. .

A flick of his glance right and left, and only the details were different; the Cutters had been pushed back into the open space at last, where the westerners’ numbers and drill could take effect.

“Let’s go,” he said.

• • •

He’d been afraid they’d have to dig the Prophet out of some underground lair, or wall him in and never be completely sure there hadn’t been some path of escape. Instead Sethaz stood at the last step below the platform where scaffolding and scattered blocks of stone told of decades of labor. His shete was in his hand; he was protected by two men with great round shields, but every now and then the steel would flick out and come back red.

This high up the pyramidal structure the artillery couldn’t be elevated enough to fire, but archers could. Carts were carrying bundles of shafts in a ceaseless stream from the reserves, and sighing clouds of gray-feathered cloth-yard arrows and stubby crossbow bolts went by overhead, sweeping the upper steps, their impact like the sound of hail on tile roofs. The dead were thick despite shields and what armor they had, and blood ran down the granite and made it slippery beneath the foot. The stink of it was thick, iron and copper and salt, the butcher’s smell of battlefields redoubled-this was a huge building, but still more packed and smaller than any open field could be. The noise was stunning, individual voices and even the hammering pulse of the Mackenzie Lambegs lost in an all-consuming white roar.

The heavy-armed troops of the High King’s Host fought their way upward, shields up against spears and blades stabbing and beating from above-the steps of the structure were around three feet tall, just enough to make the business as difficult as possible, like always fighting against mounted men in the perfect position to strike downward.

“Ready- now! ” Rudi called. “Follow me!”

Pikes slanted forward from behind, jabbing over their shoulders. He turned a spearhead with his shield-the fourth he’d had that day-and chopped. A young man in red armor blocked desperately with his shield, bringing it awkwardly across to face the left-handed attack; the Sword cut through a section of the bullhide and wicker and into his leg above the knee and through the bone.

Rudi snarled, “Morrigú!” , crouched and leapt.

The dark wings of the Crow Goddess indeed seemed to bear him up. He landed, buffeted one man aside with his shield, took off a hand at the wrist and shoved his way into the gap made when that man turned shrieking and sprayed blood into the eyes of his comrades. Blades hammered at him, thudding on his shield and cracking off the smooth steel of his armor.

“Jesu-Maria,” Ignatius wheezed, somehow beside him.

An arrow flashed between them and into the face of a spearman, Edain shooting from recklessly close. Matti was back at the base of the Temple, directing operations and feeding in reserves with a wrenched knee-some distant walled-off part of him was glad of it. One more step, and the Cutters would be forced back onto the flat unfinished top, where there was no protection.

Moving with a unison like one man monarch and monk hacked down the shieldmen protecting the Prophet and went in to kill.

Sethaz blocked a Bearkiller backsword hacking for his leg, kicked out and sent Eric Larsson tumbling backward with a yell and a dented breastplate, killed a Boisean with a slash that laid his arm open from elbow to wrist, launched a flurry of strikes at Ignatius that sent the warrior Benedictine down on one knee, guarding frantically.

Rudi lunged. The Sword slid along the Prophet’s shete, the counter cunningly sloped to keep the supernal edge from chopping through mere steel. Sethaz’ other hand snapped out and took him by the throat like a grab made of steel and gears. The metal of his bevoir began to grate and crumple.

“I. . see. . you. .”he grated, in a voice like the death of stars.

And the world vanished.

• • •

Too big, Rudi thought.

He was nowhere, and everywhere. It was dark and utterly cold and all that was material had vanished so long ago that even the memory of it was gone, but there was order here, complexity, a structure that vibrated at a level next to which atoms were coarse and chaotic as a lump of horse-dung. There was a beauty that he could not grasp, that left him weak with longing, and thoughts rushed by like huge glowing matrixes of the pure sublime. He could not grasp them, but if he could, even the least of them, he knew he would be utterly transformed, lost and yet fulfilled beyond all reckoning. .