M
örget tramped up the frost-crackling hill, naked axe in hand, and flourished it in the air. An arrow arced through the wind, tumbling as it came, and landed on its side on the hard ground next to him. He ignored it. “Come closer, you cowards! Come and fight me!” he shouted, his voice booming down to the frozen fields below.
An army stood there, watching him. The Army of Free Men, they called themselves, though they took their orders directly from a man on a horse wearing a crown. Mörget pointed his axe at the front ranks of the army and it fell back, some of its individual members tripping over those behind.
“Fear belies you! Fear makes you her slaves. Free men, ha! Fight me!” Mörget howled.
Another arrow came toward him. At this range he had time to bat it out of the air before it reached him. Mörget turned around and looked back down the hill, toward where Balint hid in the shelter of a lightning-blasted tree. The few leaves still clinging to its branches were clotted with ice.
“You’re good with taunts,” Mörget told the dwarf. “Tell me what to say to them. Tell me how to make them angry!”
Balint looked around as if afraid the men of Skrae were sneaking up on her, as if he had given away her position. Hardly likely, Mörget knew. The barbarians had caught a few pickets of this Army of Free Men. They had tortured them to learn what they could, then given them proper deaths. Now even the most daring scouts of the Burgrave’s army wouldn’t come within arrow flight of Mörget or his clans. Every time the two armies got close and Mörget thought they would at last come to blows, the cowards of Skrae would disengage and withdraw with all possible speed.
Even now, with Mörget well in range, they were pulling away. The man with the crown signaled to his serjeants, whirling a flanged mace over his head and repeatedly pointing north. The serjeants got the men moving. They couldn’t seem to keep proper formations, but they were glad enough to move away, and it didn’t take long before the entire army was marching away in retreat.
“Tell me how to insult them. I’m no scold. What will offend them most?” Mörget demanded.
Balint shivered but she found her voice. “Drop your breeks. Show them your arse and spread your buttocks so they can see your little ring. That’ll give them a bull’s-eye to target,” she said.
Mörget shook his head and came stamping back down the hill toward her. He grabbed her up under his arm and carried her back to the road, two low hills away, where the barbarian horde was marching west. The clans were tired and foot-sore, and on short rations, but they gave Mörget a hearty cheer when he appeared above them.
He hurried toward the van where his father and sister rode before their standards. He jogged alongside Mörg’s horse and called up to him, “They’re retreating again. They’re demoralized. If we gave chase, we could take them easily.”
“Aye,” Mörg said, as if he was seriously considering it. “We could break their main force in an afternoon. But only if we spend two weeks chasing them down. They want us to follow. They want to lead us as far from Ness as they can.” He shook his head. “No, Mountainslayer. If there’s no fight in them, why bother?”
Mörget was stunned. The clans had spoken for war. They had already questioned Mörg’s judgment once, when they forced him to march west from Helstrow. Now he would defy them by refusing to let them fight?
It was Mörg’s right to make decisions for the entire horde, of course. That was his function as Great Chieftain. Yet to so openly deny his people what they wanted most . . .
Wheels began to turn inside Mörget’s mind. “Father,” he said, intentionally addressing Mörg in the most familiar and therefore least respectful way possible, “a warrior does not show mercy to his enemies when he meets them on the field.”
If Mörg understood the subtext of what his son said—that the name Mörg the Merciful was not an honorific—he chose to ignore the challenge. “I have every intention of destroying that army. Just not yet. When we take Ness, they’ll have to come to us—and we’ll be in a far better position to crush them. We’ll be well-fed, well-rested, and behind strong walls. The key to Skrae is to hold the three cities, Helstrow, Redweir, and Ness. Once we’re properly invested, they’ll never loosen our grip. You wanted to conquer this land. Let’s do it properly.”
Mörget fumed but he resisted the urge to call his father a coward. That could only end one way, with one of them dead. Instead he tried to think strategically. It was not his forte. “We’ll be leaving an army behind us. Astraddle our supply lines,” he countered.
Mörg turned and looked at him with something akin to pride. Mörget could not remember the last time that had happened. “Good thinking. But we’ll also leave them with no base to operate from. Strand them out here in these empty fields all winter—they’ll freeze so solid when we emerge in the spring, we’ll have to chip them out of the ice just to make them thralls.”
Mörget fell back and fetched his own horse. He rode among the chieftains of his clans—dark men, grim as he was. There was much muttering, some of which he joined. When they stopped to camp for the night, one of the chieftains took him aside behind a tent. “Your father’s making a mistake,” the man said. “He’s made a lot of mistakes already.”
Mörget eyed the man critically. His name was Thürbalt, and his beard was shot with white, but his arms were near as thick as Mörget’s own and he’d never lost a wrestling match. He commanded two hundred men and thralls, most of whom he was related to either by marriage or bastardry, and he had a right to speak his mind. Mörget couldn’t remember the last time he’d done so, however.
Now, he had chosen to break his silence. With a dire accusation indeed. Chieftains who made mistakes did not remain chieftains for long.
Not when they could so easily be replaced.
“Who do you speak for?” Mörget asked.
“Myself alone,” Thürbalt said, which was cautious but proper.
“When you speak for all, you tell me.” Mörget had to be cautious himself. Questioning Mörg’s decisions wasn’t sedition, not among the clans. But gathering men of like opinion, muttering in darkness, spreading mistrust—these things had a way of quickly moving from speech to action. “I obey the will of my clans,” Mörget finished. It was an old formulation, a figure of speech. It could also be a promise.
In the morning, the file marched through a plain of frost-hard fields that extended to the horizon in every direction, where birds circled endlessly looking for one last forgotten seed or bit of fallen grain. Mörget, lost in his thoughts, saw little of it, and was only brought up from his reverie when a messenger came back from the van to tell him Mörg wanted him.
Jogging forward, Mörget wondered idly if Mörg had heard the whispers in the night. This might be a chastisement—or a challenge to his honor. Perhaps things would come to a head far sooner than he’d expected.
Yet when he reached the van, he saw Mörgain dancing with arms raised high, giving thanks to Mother Death. Some of the berserkers had joined her. Mörg stood high up in the crotch of a dead tree, one hand shading his eyes.
“I thought you’d like to see this, Mountainslayer. Come up, to me.”
Mörget clambered up the creaking branches to perch next to his father. “What is it?” he demanded. “I haven’t broken my fast yet.”
“No time for surly words, my boy,” Mörg said. He could not hide the excitement in his voice. “There! Look! Surely your young eyes see it better than mine.”
Mörg looked. And there it was. Across the plain, no more than four hours’ march away, stood a strangely regular shape, a form of straight lines and shining brick that circled a cloven hill. A wall. A city wall.
The wall of Ness.
The Siege of Ness
I
n theory there were no officers in the Army of Free Men. There were serjeants, of course, because no army can function without men to scream at the soldiers and give them their orders. But there were no lieutenants, no captains, and no generals.
There was of course Ommen Tarness, the Burgrave of the Free City of Ness. The man who had organized the army in the first place and its de facto leader. Yet he went to great pains to remind the men that he was a common soldier like any of them, and that if they accepted his commands and followed his decrees, it was simply because they recognized he had the best ideas and the most meaningful contributions to their effort.
Together with a cadre of the army’s finest scouts, he went in person to spy on the barbarian horde when it arrived at Ness. Like a common scout, he lay in the mud on a hill a half mile away so he could see what the army would face in battle.
Of course one had to be practical about such things, so he had a bear hide to lie in, while his fellow soldiers had to suffice with moldering blankets. His wineskin was full of fine malmsey as well, and he had dried venison to chew on while his men sufficed with weak ale and pemmican. And of course he wore—as always—his golden coronet, which marked him out in any group of men.
“There,” one of the scouts whispered, and pointed down the hill. “That’ll be the first of them.” The scouts had been lying in their perch since before dawn. The sun had been up for three hours with no sign of the enemy—they were certainly in no hurry.
Before the van of their force the barbarians sent vedettes ahead—mounted sentries who watched every side of the road as if they expected some sudden ambush. One rider wheeled his horse around right below the wall of Ness, well within bowshot. When no one tried to shoot him, he let out a piercing whistle that the scouts could hear quite plainly, even from so far away. The rest of the vedettes moved to take up positions on the sides of the road. They stayed watchful, even though no trace of resistance had been offered.
Perhaps they were as surprised as Tarness. What he could see of the city beyond its defensive wall looked much as it always had. Smoke rose from a hundred chimneys. Shutters were open to catch the morning air and dispel the night’s closeness. Tarness could even see people moving about the streets, going about their everyday tasks.
It was as if no one inside was even aware that they were about to be besieged. “I expected slightly more of Pritchard Hood,” Tarness said. There were certain things one did when facing a siege, things that should have been done long since. The wall showed no trace of hoardings, nor were any ballistae or onagers set up on its wide battlements. The gates were closed up tight, but so were the sally ports—small doors set into the more massive gates, through which defenders could emerge to harass the incoming horde. There was no sign at all of such a force, however. There was not so much as a delegation of parley to speak with the barbarians when they arrived.
Down in the road, Mörg and his children came now on horseback, and behind them an honor guard of berserkers. The red-painted faces of the manic warriors were slack with exhaustion, but they jogged to keep up with the ambling horses. They had their weapons over their shoulders in good order and looked ready for anything the city might throw at them.
“Strange. There should be flags flying on Castle Hill,” one of the scouts said.
Tarness frowned. The man was right. Not so much as a pennon flew at the top of the city. In fact, the more Tarness looked at his old palace and the barracks where his guard resided, the more he got the feeling something was missing. He couldn’t make out much detail from so far away, but he got the impression that the walled enclosure from which he’d previously ruled the city was deserted.
The main force of the horde came down the road on foot, thousands of reavers and berserkers and thralls in no particular formation. They carried packs on their backs or drove wagons loaded with supplies. Tarness saw bundles of long stakes and countless acres of deer hide for tents, a round score of anvils, casks, and barrels by the hundred to hold mead and beer, flour, dried meat, turnips, and pickled fish.
Tarness had been a general for a very long time, far longer than any of his men suspected. He was struck by how orderly the wagons were loaded, and how well supplied the horde was. Most armies lived by foraging—the Army of Free Men lived on the produce of the land, for instance, on whatever game its soldiers could catch and whatever supplies of grain they could requisition from local farms.
When you intended to lay siege to a city, though, you couldn’t just send out all your men each day to hunt and gather for themselves. The land around the besieged city would be picked clean in the first few days and you’d be forced to send your foragers out ever farther in search of food, stretching your lines until you could no longer effectively storm the city should the opportunity arise. The barbarians had a reputation as reckless fighters, but apparently this Mörg the Wise had more foresight than some civilized generals Tarness had fought against.
While the scouts watched, the barbarians set up their camp a quarter mile away from the city walls. Far enough away to avoid any missile fire from the walls, but close enough so no one could escape the city without being caught. The camp went up with remarkable speed, as if the barbarians had done this a thousand times before. Small knots of men set about erecting a thousand tents, while others dug neat latrine pits well clear of the main camp. Others set up makeshift forges for the blacksmiths who would keep their weapons in good repair, or built stone ovens to bake bread to feed the camp. The work was done well before nightfall, when most of the horde turned in to sleep. Others stayed at watch around blazing campfires or stood picket duty at the edge of the camp.
It was all done with such efficiency and trim as Tarness had never seen before in any civilized army. It would have taken the king’s own troops weeks to achieve all that. By full dark the barbarians were settled in fully to their new home.
One woman, her face painted like a skull, broke open a series of barrels and let the men fill horns and leather cups with thick mead, which made them laugh so brightly Tarness could hear it on his ridge. Mörg himself stood on a crude platform and gave a speech, and received a great cheer.
Mörg’s son, whose face was painted like a berserker, broke off from the rest and went to stand outside the Hunter’s Gate of Ness. He simply stood there while darkness fell and lights came on inside the city. Stood and stared at the wall, as if he could bring it down by sheer effort of concentration. Perhaps he was waiting for someone up on the wall to call down to him, to make some effort at communication. He waited in vain, if that was the case.
He was still there when Tarness indicated that the scouts should withdraw. He’d seen enough. Rising stiffly from their perches, the men headed back down the side of the ridge to where they’d left their horses.
Tarness had a lot to think about. What he’d seen had been instructive enough—but what he hadn’t seen was far more troubling. Hood should have offered some resistance, surely. He should have at least shown the colors of Ness in defiance of the siege. “Something, anything, to show he was unwilling to give up,” Tarness muttered. Unless Hood had betrayed him and struck a deal with Mörg, to open the gates and let the barbarians move inside. But no, that was impossible. Tarness had picked Hood for his zeal and his utter hatred of anyone who didn’t worship the Lady. And furthermore, Mörg had set up camp exactly as if he expected a protracted siege.
What in the sacred name of the Lady was going on?
“We’ll ride back to headquarters at once,” one of the scouts said, in that deferential way the Free Men had. They’d learned not to ask Tarness directly for an order, but instead to state what they expected him to say as if they’d come up with it themselves. Then he would approve or disapprove as if offering counsel only, and not an actual command. Tarness nodded and the scouts mounted up.
Another of the men leapt up onto his horse and drew his sword. “In two days we can be back here with the Free Men, every one of them ready to die to relieve the Free City. We’ll show them what they get for picking a fight with Ness!”
The others looked to Tarness. They seemed ready to cheer the idea but needed his approval first.
Sadly, he couldn’t give it. He sighed and climbed up into his own saddle. “Yesterday,” he said, “I watched our men drilling at pike squares.”
The scouts looked at each other as if wondering what he was getting at.
“Most of them,” Tarness said, “have figured out how to march in a straight line. They can even turn when they’re ordered to. Though some of them still have to put down their weapons to look at their hands and remember which direction is left and which is right. Half of them are stricken with camp fever, and the other half with the sailor pox from all those camp followers I told you to drive off. Their armor is rusty, their weapons are falling apart. Not a single one of them has ever fought in an actual battle.”
One of the scouts shook his head. “They’ve got heart, though—they love their city and will be fierce in its defense.”
Tarness smiled at the man. In his experience that did count for something—but not as much as soldiers who knew how to shoulder arms or brace for a cavalry charge. “You know that my ancestor, Juring Tarness, was a great general. He had a saying that has been passed down through the generations. ‘If one wants to be renowned for one’s great victories, the best thing to do is not fight any battles where one might lose.’ ”
Tarness glanced back in the direction of Ness, though it was hidden now by the side of the ridge. He didn’t need to see it to remember what it looked like. “No, I advise we hold off for now. Keep drilling the men, make them as ready as we can. But it would be suicide right now to take on an army that well organized and blooded. Ness will have to hold out on its own awhile longer.”
“How much longer?” a scout asked, his eyes wide in the moonlight. He looked almost angry at what Tarness had suggested.
Tarness smiled. “Until some miracle occurs, and we actually have a chance. But don’t worry.” He flicked his reins and got his horse moving. “The Lady is on our side.”