Child Of Storms (Volume 1) (44 page)

The Knights of Havenwood took to calling the event the Battle of the Widowing Gap. Hammeredshield’s men called it the Battle of Three Days and Nights. Ironhelm’s folk had more poetic spirit, however, and referred to it as the Battle When it Rained Stones.

_____

              A century later, the gap was much changed. The Hammeredshields had built a sturdy wall of granite across its width, fifty feet high and more than twenty feet thick. It was nothing complicated, merely a dense wall in the middle of the road completely walling-up the mountain pass. A walkway along the top overlooked battlements and a rectangular guardhouse was tucked off into one side of the cliff. A pair of stairs led up to the top of the wall and a trio of huge catapults sat about twenty feet back from the wall ready to hurl missiles against any attackers approaching the gap. 

Ironhelm took in his surroundings, the flood of memories still pouring in. Small clumps of pine trees grew once again on either side of the thin road as they approached the gap. Wildflowers lined the side of the path, too. Ironhelm’s eye fell on a blue and yellow butterfly fluttering around and it took him by surprise. What was such a creature doing here this time of year, so high up in the mountains?

              On either side ascended lines of metal rungs driven into the side of the cliffs. The crude handholds nailed into the rock during the battle were long gone, replaced by easily-grasped rungs allowing access to the top of the cliffs hundreds of feet above.

             
“A watchtower sits atop the mountain far above in case of attack,” Hammeredshield said. He’d been talking for some time about the gap’s defenses, but Ironhelm had not noticed.

“On either side of the gap,” he went on. “An avalanche of rock and stone can be brought down upon an attacking enemy with the simple pull of a cord. And the dwarves stationed atop the cliffs are well-protected in guardhouses of their own, secure against a surprise attack.”

Ironhelm nodded, considering the fortifications. A century ago, the Widowing Gap was held without benefit of any built defenses. Now, an attacking enemy would face challenges nearly impossible to overcome.

“Within the guardhouses carved into the sides of the gap is a large network of barracks, kitchens, and supply rooms,” Hammeredshield went on. “It took us fifty years to carve it all out of the mountainside, it did, but in the event of a general attack we can keep a sizeable force supplied and fed indefinitely. Aye, we’ve even got a hospital down beneath.”

“What if an enemy just tunnels under all this?” Jorn wondered. “How do you stop that?”

“Tha’ is solid rock under your feet, Thane Ravenbane,” Hammeredshield said. “It would take an enemy months, years even, to dig so much as a single tiny tunnel. Even so, we’ve driven lines of metal bars deep into the rock both in front of and behind the wall. Aye, it would be near impossible to undermine the gate. But even if an enemy managed the feat…”

He turned around, pointing out some piles of huge granite blocks piled up along each side of the gap about fifty yards back.

“See that?” he said. “Funds have been short but, someday soon, we’ll be building a second wall back from the first. In between, we’ll line the gorge with arrow slits. Let an enemy somehow get between the walls and it’ll be a killing field from four sides all at once. There is talk of building a moat between the walls, too, crossed by a narrow drawbridge. Someday maybe we’ll build a third and then a fourth wall. We’ll never let the gruk scum threaten our families again, not through this gap.”

“It sounds as though you’ve thought of everything,” Willock said, gazing up the cliff sides. He could see battlements looking down upon them from the heights.

“It is invincible,” Hammeredshield said.

              They dismounted to eat lunch with their escort before crossing over into the wilderness. It was a fine meal of roast pork and some boiled parsnips, washed down with plenty of ale. The commander of the fortifications at the gap, an elderly dwarf who introduced himself as Trum Redhammer, joined them. He went on during the entire meal about the fortifications.

             
“Tha’ wall is impregnable!” he declared. “Aye, impregnable! Its thickness is the key to its strength, it is. We buil’ it a full twen’y fee’ thick, all solid grani’e the whole way.”

             
Jorn was barely listening. The enormity of what lay beyond the wall was heavy on his mind. 

_____

             
The dwarves opened the single door in the wall and the travelers passing through. It was just the six of them, their mounts, and the pair of packhorses loaded down with all manner of supplies. One by one they led the mounts through the little door, barely large enough for Ailric’s huge warhorse to even fit through into the narrow tunnel beyond. Redhammer went ahead to slide aside a pair of thick bolts and unlock the steel door leading to the other side. They passed through, leading their horses on foot one-by-one.

             
Hammeredshield and Redhammer followed them through the door and stood beneath the imposing wall to see them off.

             
“Farewell,” Hammeredshield said. “We hope your expedition is fruitful.”

             
“Aye, so do we,” Ironhelm said. 

             
“These lands are infested with gruks, trolls, and worse,” Hammeredshield warned. “Take all due care. The only non-evil beings you are likely to encounter are a small fellowship of human monks, hermits living about five miles down the pass.”

             
“Monks?” Ailric said. “Living out there?”

             
“Aye, members of the Thugamundian Brothers,” Hammeredshield said. “We’ve warned them what peril they place themselves in, but they seem not to care. For at least ten years now they’ve lived out there, praying to Une in their solitude. They are half-mad, if you ask me.”

             
“Thank you for your hospitality,” Ironhelm said. “It was a most welcome respite, it was. Aye, tis true.”

             
“Thank me? No, it is I whom am in debt to all of you for showing up when you did yesterday,” Hammeredshield said.

             
“Aye. Farewell, laddie.”

             
Ironhelm turned his pony away from the wall and towards the wilderness. Slowly, the others followed. Jorn allowed himself a last long gaze at the wall before turning away and riding on down the road.  The road was far different here than on the dwarven side of the wall. The dwarves had stripped the sides of the pass of all trees and small boulders for hundreds of yards, denying the benefit of cover to any attackers coming up towards the gap. Three rows of arrow slits lined either side of the gap, too, starting about twenty feet up, no doubt part of the underground complex the dwarves had spoken of.

The road in front of the wall was no longer maintained so well, bits of weeds growing tall through the many cracks in the pavement. Every hundred yards in front of the wall the dwarves had driven lines of thick iron spikes across the road. They protruded upwards a few feet from the ground, but one could only guess how far down they were driven.

              “That’s smart,” Willock remarked as they passed through the first series of barriers. “There’s no way for an enemy to bring catapults or heavy siege engines in close to the wall so long as the spikes stand.”

             
“I would think it would also serve to blunt a cavalry charge, as well,” Ailric said, gingerly guiding his horse between the spikes. The horse only barely fit.

             
“Clever,” Jorn said, glancing up the walls of the gap. Far above, he knew, were vast metal nets holding back thousands of rocks.

             
“I must say, I’m not terribly religious,” said Flatfoot. “These – what are they called, again? -  Thugamundian Brothers? Whatever are they?”

             
“The Mad Monks, we call them in the North,” Jorn said. “Grang’s teeth, they’re nothing but a bunch of raving fools.”

             
“Oh, yes,” Flatfoot said. “Not exactly fat and happy monks, if memory serves.”

             
“That would be the Gormalite Brothers,” Ailric said, grinning. “Now those are fellows who are not shy about their love of good food and drink.”

             
“The Thugamundians are aesthetics,” Ronias interjected. “They seek a mystic union with the universe by transcending mundane desires. They believe they can best achieve this in isolation from the noise and corruption of civilization.”

             
“Bah,” Jorn said.

             
“Theirs is path few would care to follow, to be sure,” Ronias said. “Myself included. They are bound by the strictest codes of self-deprivation and only live in the tiniest of communities, always on the fringes of civilization. They deprive themselves of every worldly comfort, seeking a higher spiritual state.”

             
“Bloody nonsense!” Flatfoot said. “This denial of the flesh! Are we born merely to suffer? I think not.”

“You’re in no danger of being mistaken for an aesthetic, Sal” Jorn laughed.

              “I just don’t know what type of higher bliss they expect to find living an existence I wouldn’t subject a bloody dog to,” Flatfoot said. “I’m not going to worry about questions which can never be answered.”

Rounding a curve in the road, they came upon the monks. Ten tiny stone huts the shape of beehives stood in a tight cluster, each barely large enough for a man to lie down inside. A slightly-larger structure stood in the middle, a crude little pile of stones without windows. It was an altogether forlorn little encampment.

              “Are they still alive?” Ailric wondered as they passed underneath.

             
“I don’t know,” Willock said. “It looks abandoned.”

             
As if to answer their question, they suddenly spotted a man standing amidst the trees right next to the cluster of huts. He was tall and pale, standing barefoot and clad in a tattered brown tunic long since reduced to rags. He was filthy, and so gaunt his ribs protruded from underneath his skin. A long, tangled beard and wild hair covered up most of his face. Intense, dark eyes stared out from beneath the grime, watching the strangers passing by.

             
“Are you in need, sir?” Ailric shouted.

             
“Renounce your ways, knight!” the monk shouted back. His voice boomed and echoed against the mountains. “Seek Une, not battle! Join us now, whilst you still can!”

             
“Damned fanatics,” Ailric muttered as they rode on by.

             
Jorn said nothing, recalling the small group of Thugamundians on Glaenavon. They lived on a tiny island not a hundred yards across just within sight of the main island along a particularly empty stretch of rocky coast. Jorn wouldn’t have even described their home as an island. It was more like a barren rock rising from the stormy sea. The miserable little place was forever hammered by waves and buffeted by the northern winds, but it was there the monks decided to build their little huts. The waves would crash all the way up and over the rocks during the worst of winter storms and sometimes even wash an entire beehive hut away, more than once with a brother in it. Despite all that, after every such storm the brothers would re-build their huts and continued to cling to their rough way of life no matter what misfortune befell them.

Fearach pointed them out as they strolled along the coast after Jorn had been on Glaenavon only a few weeks.

              “They live only in the smallest groups, never more than twenty and always clinging to the edge of wilderness,” Fearach explained. “Any larger and they fear that they will grow too worldly and hierarchical.”

             
“Why do they do it?” Jorn asked. “I mean, you’ve explained why they
say
they do it but why would anyone actually want such a life?”

             
Fearach shrugged. “Perhaps they are men for whom the answers are more important than just asking the questions,” he said.

             
One day, they were passing by the rock and saw the brothers ashore foraging. They gathered berries and dug up roots. A few were down on the beach, digging for clams. Jorn was instinctively repulsed by them, starving cockroaches of men shoving unwashed raw onions into their mouths like wild dogs roaming the streets of Glorbinden. One amongst them still looked well-fed, however. His tunic was not yet so ragged and his beard not yet so long and tangled. He must have been a new recruit. For the rest of the day, Jorn though about the man. What, he wondered,  had driven the novice monk to such a life?

_____

             
A few miles after encountering the monks, the road turned sharply south and followed a mountain ridge running parallel to the valley they’d heard so much about. It stretched out before them, running north and south as far as they could see.

To the west, they saw the next ridge of the Great Barrier Mountains looking down upon them from thousands of feet further up. The mountains rose with indescribable grandeur, their lower slopes blanketed by thick carpets of forest and their upper slopes a combination of bare rock and wide expanses of white snow. Many miles to the south, at the very limits of their vision, they saw a pair of particularly tall and jagged mountains looming high above the mountains all around.