The Fate of the Fallen (The Song of the Tears Book 1) (47 page)

Monkshart came running up to where the huge peasant stood,
still holding Nish. The peasant had carried him to the archer’s rise on the
right hand side of the neck, so he could keep the battlefield in view.

Monkshart paled at the sight of the bloody wound, then
rapped out, ‘Bring him back to my tent, soldier.’

‘No!’ Nish said urgently, feeling his focus fading. He
willed himself back to full alertness. He had to hold out for long enough to
enact the plan, and hopefully spring the trap. No one else could do it;
certainly not Monkshart.

It seemed to grow dark suddenly. Nish tried to speak, though
it was hard to form the words. ‘Tell me what’s happening, soldier,’ he said in
a gritty croak. ‘Every detail.’

‘They’re starting to advance,’ the huge peasant said in a
deep burr. ‘Their archers have just fired a volley but it went overhead, into
the tents.’

‘Tell our troops the Deliverer says to throw down their
weapons and look panicky.’

‘Troops –’ roared the peasant.

‘Don’t tell the enemy as well, you bloody fool. Send
runners.’

They were sent. Nish’s sight returned for a few seconds,
just long enough to see the enemy moving more quickly now, but faded once more.
‘What’s … happening?’

‘Our archers are firing again,’ said the peasant. ‘Half the
enemy front line has gone down but they’re coming on. They’re halfway across
the dip; going slowly now; bogging down.’ He paused for a good while. ‘They’re
almost to the pile of bodies. They’re climbing the pile. The first of them are
jumping down onto solid ground. Do I give the signal?’

‘Not – yet,’ said Nish, cursing his weakness. How
could he fight a battle when he couldn’t even see? ‘How many are on solid
ground?’

‘A few hundred. They’re coming slowly; they’re so weary they
can barely walk.’

‘Good. How many have fallen to our arrows?’

‘About the same number.’

‘Not enough,’ Nish whispered. ‘Give the first signal,
soldier.’

He felt the soldier raise his arm. ‘Done, surr. Our men are
still moving backwards.’

‘Excellent …’ Time passed. Nish had no idea how much. He
felt so very weak and listless. He couldn’t care about anything.

‘More than half their army is on solid ground now. They’re
about to attack, Deliverer.’

‘Wait,’ said Nish, though he was no longer sure of himself.
The plan was slipping away with his consciousness. ‘Now!’

He felt the soldier slash his arm down, there came a great
roar and the ground shook as the enemy made a last effort.

‘Our troops are grabbing their fallen weapons, surr. They’re
forming into a wedge in the centre of the neck. The enemy are coming at them.
They’re attacking.
They’re getting
through!
’ The peasant said no more for agonising moments. Nish could hear
the man’s pounding heartbeat, but could not feel his own. ‘No, they’re
splitting to go around and attack our boys from both sides. They’re going to
–’

‘Third signal,’ Nish whispered.

The soldier whipped his arm up again. ‘Our soldiers are
attacking furiously, surr. The enemy are fighting back but they can barely hold
up their swords. Now our women and children are coming at them from between the
tents. The enemy are still fighting – they’re doing bloody slaughter on
us, surr! I think …

‘No, our spearmen have moved out on either side, to cut them
off. Our swordsmen are going at their flanks, driving them backwards, backwards
… Oh, surr, surr!’ cried the burly peasant, shaking Nish in his arms, pain from
the waggling arrow breaking through his lassitude.

‘We’re pushing their flank right back, over the edge.
They’re breaking! They’re breaking, surr! They’re running down the steep slope
towards the swamp. They’ll never get out of there. The left flank are breaking
too. They’re over the edge. Our archers are moving into position. It’s over,
Deliverer, surr. We’ve beaten the finest the God-Emperor’s Imperial Militia
could send at us. Oh, surr!’

The huge peasant was shaking, laughing, crying and dancing,
and Nish felt the man’s tears falling on his cheeks as he slid into
unconsciousness.

 
THIRTY-FOUR

Maelys was so tired that she hadn’t realised the attack
was happening until the tent was torn away in a maelstrom of snapping canvas
and flying tent poles and pegs. A knotted rope whacked her so hard on the right
cheekbone that she was bound to get a black eye out of it. All around her,
people were screaming or crying out to each other. No one knew what had
happened; everyone feared the worst.

‘Be quiet!’ Tulitine’s voice sounded nearby, and such was
her authority that everyone fell silent. Unshuttering a lantern, she directed a
narrow beam around her. She was clad in healer’s robes, like Maelys’s, though
of a darker green with a black sash.

‘Stop whining!’ Tulitine said disgustedly to a group of
women huddling around someone lying on the other side of the tent floor. ‘We
always knew the God-Emperor was going to attack the Defiance, and now he has.
Get your weapons and prepare to defend the camp.’

‘Vula is dying,’ sobbed a frizzy-haired woman about Maelys’s
age. ‘It’s not fair. She never hurt anyone.’

Tulitine crouched down by the tall girl who lay flat on her
back with the splintered half of a tent pole embedded in her throat. Maelys
came around the other side. The girl was choking but there was no point trying
to remove the pole – it had torn through the arteries in her neck and a
bucket of blood had pooled on the ground beneath her. As Maelys watched, the
choking stopped.

Tulitine closed the girl’s eyes with her fingers. The frizzy-haired
woman began to wail. Tulitine whirled, slapping her across the face so hard
that it knocked her head sideways.

‘This is war, girl. Ever since you left your village you’ve
been boasting about how brave you are, so stop whining and get to your
position. And if you have to die,
which
you probably will
, do it with a dignity worthy of the Deliverer.’

In short order, Tulitine organised the defence of the tents
and sent teams to beat the fires out and shovel earth over the cinders. A
healers’ tent was set up, cloth torn into rags and cauldrons of water put into
the fires to boil. The attack had caused dozens of injuries, and arrows as many
more. The dead were humped to the back of the camp and laid out next to the
rocks. The living waited.

Maelys stood at the opening of the healers’ tent, tension
drawing the knots in her belly ever tighter. The fall of arrows had stopped and
the enemy army was at the foot of the hill. Before she’d left home, reading
about adventures such as this had been her lifeblood, but being in one wasn’t
the least bit exciting. It was violent, brutal and, worst of all, random. She’d
hadn’t taken that in before, but it could as easily have been her lying dead
with a tent pole in her throat, or Tulitine,
or Nish
.

He was leading his troops from the front, and as a hero of
the lyrinx wars Nish was probably the best person to do so. She stood up on
tiptoe but could only see the dark mass of ill-trained Defiance defenders
waiting for the attack that would roll right over them. The God-Emperor’s
troops had a fearsome reputation. They’d never been beaten in battle, and
they’d had plenty of time to prepare, so how could this puny rabble hope to
hold them back? Though Maelys was optimistic by nature, she couldn’t find any
hope. The sides of the hill would run red with the blood of the Defiance and
then the enemy would push through to the women and children.

The children and old women would die, the young women only
spared to be used the way soldiers used women in war, then slain or dragged off
to the God-Emperor’s interrogation pits.

She fought down an urge to abandon her post and run, but
even if she had been minded to, it was already growing light and there was
nowhere to hide on the grassy plains. No one would be allowed to survive to
tell the story of the Deliverer and his Defiance. There would be no tales of
courage in the face of impossible odds, or small heroes defying the all-powerful
God-Emperor, only of Jal-Nish’s crushing might.

Maelys was reminded of Nish’s words on the way to
Tifferfyte. ‘It’s the common folk who suffer most in a revolution, and no one
gives a damn, least of all the people who are making revolution in their name.’
She wondered if Nish were remembering those words now as he watched the
peasants die.

Another flight of arrows rattled around them and someone
gasped. The woman who had been working beside her just a few minutes ago lay
thrashing with a red-and-black-feathered arrow in her belly. Maelys knelt
beside her, studying the wound, then cut off the arrowhead protruding from her
back and began to pull the shaft out, but before she had drawn it all the way
the woman was dead.

Maelys dragged her to one side and returned to the flap.
Dawn was spreading across the sky. It would not be long now. The ground shook
as the army pounded up the hill.

‘Hoy, Healer, over here.’

There were a dozen healers here now, but Maelys was as
skilled as most, and ran to help. Two women were heaving an old man onto a
trestle table. He had deep, ragged gouges across his back and shoulders –
flappeter wounds – though unless they became infected he would survive.
She carried across a bucket of hot water and began to clean the torn flesh with
steaming cloths.

Other casualties were brought in and she was soon so
immersed in her work that she scarcely gave a thought to what was happening
outside, though she could not block out the screams of the maimed and dying.

A massed roar went up, a sound that sent a shiver down
her back. She washed her hands yet again, wiped them on a clean rag and turned
away from the young man she was bandaging. The battle must be over, the
Defiance lost.

Taking a knife from the table, she went to the flap, expecting
to see the enemy flooding towards her. It was bright daylight now, the sun just
rising, but all she saw were the blood-covered rebels whooping and embracing
each other.

Even after the healers began laughing, weeping and cheering,
Maelys couldn’t take it in. They’d won? How could it be possible?

A messenger girl came running and caught Maelys by the hand.
‘Healer, Lord Monkshart bids you come, quick!’ She began to drag Maelys towards
the neck of the hill.

‘What’s the matter? Who is it?’ But there was a pain in the
middle of her chest, just under the breastbone, and it grew stronger all the
time. She knew what the girl was going to say.

‘It’s the Deliverer, Healer. He took an arrow in the back.’

Pain speared through her from front to back. ‘But he’s all
right?’

‘Just come.’

The rebels had gathered along the sides of the hill, leaving
the centre open, and for the first time she saw the full horror of the battle.
Bodies lay everywhere, where they’d fallen, while down at the narrowest point
of the neck the dead made a wall waist high and a good forty paces wide. She
couldn’t see how far down the slope it extended but there had to be thousands
of bodies in it.

It was the most gruesome sight she’d ever seen, and already
flies were swarming. Carrion birds wheeled high above and more were joining
them every minute.

Then she saw him. A huge soldier held Nish in his arms, and
even from fifty paces away she could see the long arrow in Nish’s lower back
and his sagging head. He looked so small, so frail, so dead. She gathered up
her skirts and ran.

Before she got there, Monkshart stepped out from behind the
giant, and Phrune from behind him. Maelys faltered, then continued. Nish needed
her help. She was one of the better healers here, and she had been called. She couldn’t
turn back now, though they were bound to discover her identity and then she was
done for.

Head bowed so her hood would fall forwards, she continued
past them and began to examine Nish’s wound. Monkshart’s hand caught her upper
arm and jerked her painfully towards him. His hand reached out to push her hood
back. His eyes were glittering.

‘If he dies, Healer –’

 
THIRTY-FIVE

‘Unhand her, Monkshart!’ Tulitine’s voice came like a
whip crack. ‘It is blasphemy to lay a finger on the Healers of Flammermoul, and
well you know it.’

Monkshart’s hard fingers crushed Maelys’s biceps, but he let
her go. ‘I intended no insult,’ he said, bowing low towards the old woman, ‘but
I must be sure she
is
a healer. That
habit can just as easily hide a spy or a traitor, and the Deliverer –’

‘She’s been doing her work here for days,’ Tulitine said
coldly, shooing him out of the way. ‘If you’re so concerned about the
Deliverer, you’ll let her get on with it.’

Maelys could feel Phrune’s eyes on her as if he were trying
to burn a hole through her robes, but the old woman took him by the collar and
hauled him off. ‘And keep your festering acolyte out of her way.’

Monkshart cuffed Phrune over the side of the head. ‘Take my
personal guard – ten men. Secure the army’s war chest plus any surviving
battle mancers and devices of the Art. Have the dead stripped of their weapons
and valuables. Make sure the horses with the supply wagons don’t stampede. And
then –’

‘Check the dying, Master, for those who may prove useful,’
said Phrune.

‘Indeed,’ said Monkshart and walked away.

For their skins: those who were dying of head injuries only.
Maelys couldn’t think about Phrune sneaking about in the pile of dead and
dying, licking his lips as he relieved the still-living of their skins, or else
she would not be able to do her work. It was just one more horror in this most
terrible of days.